Imagine that you have successfully developed software or application, made exceptional efforts to assure its quality, and finally, you launch it into the market. Wow-what a perfect scenario it is for organizations to daydream about. But what if your application just starts crashing whenever a pool of audience wants to use it? Or what if your developed software is not what users have expected it to be in terms of reliability and responsiveness? Ouch! This second scenario may have given you goosebumps, right?
There’s a famous quote i.e “ The greatest mistake of a person is to imagine that he has never erred”.
Humans are creatures that learn from their mistakes. In the business world, entrepreneurs and business leaders are quite overconfident that they can never make a mistake. However, there’s no such thing that has not been corrected and there’s no such human who has never made any mistakes in his/her career. Likewise is with the software development industry. Striving for perfection and not being able to get what was expected, lead many professionals in a state of frustration. In the software development industry, competition is continuously becoming fierce. Organizations thrive to cope up with this fierce competition with all they can do and they have. They try to develop products that suffice the users’ expectations but unfortunately fails and are reluctant to accept the fact that their own product development issues have caused the failure.
The software development life-cycle includes a variety of phases in it. Every phase has its own specific operational requirements. To ensure that each phase is properly being treated tech firms indulge their software testing teams to ensure the quality of the product being developed. For this purpose testers use a variety of resources to fasten the whole testing process, including issue tracking tools as a common method to track different types of defects in the software. But still, some bugs are left or skipped as tools are also operated with the command of people, therefore 100% bug coverage is impossible.
How do we classify bugs in software development?
Bugs or defects are categorized into 5 major categories as;
Critical Defects – The core functions of the system have failed or the system cannot run at all.
Serious Defects – Defects that affect basic functions and the system cannot operate normally.
Moderate Defects – This defect causes the system to generate incorrect, inconsistent, or incomplete results.
Minor defect – Defects only affect a few cases.
Exterior Defects – The defect is only related to the interface and appearance of the application.
What makes up a software defect-free, to a great extent?
When you build a house, go for buying a car, or any other luxury item you first make a plan about how you will buy or build, what resources will be required to do so, how much budget will be required, etc. It means that you perform a complete homework to buy or build something. Then why you show carelessness when it comes to the development of such a crucial product like software applications.
Below is a list of important aspects that must be made as a roadmap for developing a bug-free product – obviously not 100% bug-free but the reduction of bugs up to a great extent can be made possible.
Set realistic goals – It is unrealistic to expect developers to write error-free code. Try not to focus on error-free code. Always focus on providing early adopters with products with good features that can solve their problems or else provide them with a set of tools specifically issue tracking tools to detect errors from early phases of the SDLC, so that they’ll be able to provide solutions for its fixtures.
Avoid vague functional specifications – Typically a software product comes up with a variety of defects because of the gap between what features the software provides and the features that are expected by the users. This problem must be solved by creating proper technical or functional specifications before you ask your technical team to start coding.
Consider Quality above cost – Before you conduct a cost-benefit analysis of your software product, put yourself in the shoes of your targeted audience i.e decide whether you want to buy cheap software or expensive software that runs 99% of the time with the same strength and responsiveness. To have a smooth user experience, to retain as many users as possible, and to eliminate maximum defects you have to invest in special issue tracking and defect managing tools. They might cost you high in their implementation but their benefits would be for longer-term and countless.
Excessive Testing – Why do I need testing? You might have this question in your mind. Well, consider software testing as an energy booster or MULTIVITAMIN for your software products and applications. Software testing can never be ignored. You can never consider it a first slice of your bread – that you usually skip to eat.
Testing is indispensable for software strength because it helps in making it possible for an organization to always keep up a balance between customer expectations and their overall productivity goals. Testing makes sure that a product is well investigated, bugs have been hunted at their best, and those bugs have been fixed with potential solutions. Normally, it takes quite a long for manual testing teams to ensure that a software product is free of errors and glitches and is unexploitable by cybercriminals in the future. But with the advancements in technology, the market is now overflooded with special defect management tools and issue tracking tools that aids organizations to get rid of this obstacle as well. Testing at every level and each phase of the software development life-cycle ensure that maximum defects have been dealt with it.
Wrapping it up
Quality assurance is a lifelong process that can never be outdated because of the continuous improvements in technology. Moreover, nothing in this world is perfect including software products and applications. They require rigorous testing before they are exposed to users and the market. To make your products defect-free as much as possible, software testing is one of the best ways out to tackle such type of challenges.
