Bug or Treat! What are software testers biggest fears?

Halloween 🎃 is here and it’s time to think of the most terrifying things in work of QA specialists. Our testing team unites young, brave, highly motivated experts, who strive to find even the smallest bugs. However, even our QA experts have fears. What are our testers most afraid of? Keep reading to find it out.

Tight deadlines. One of the horrors for a QA engineer is to receive requests for last minute testing. The main reasons for such requests are:

• Development process takes more time than expected. According to 2018 PMI’s Pulse of the Profession report, 36% of projects were not completed on time.
• Time for testing is underestimated. In general testing and debugging take 50% of the development time. To make the precise calculation for development time some companies double their initial estimations for the development and add buffer time on top of that.

When QA specialists have a short time frame for testing they check software against the main business scenarios and not so meticulously as if they have enough time. Software testing should start at least three days before release. And forget about regression testing after bug fixing.

Testing documentation written by others. In the case of QA, it’s faster to write a documentation from scratch than to use the one written by others. When people work on their project day by day, they focus on vulnerabilities a lot. At the same time, they might not pay due attention to other product features during testing. Using test cases made by others not only increase the time for testing but also put limitations in terms of finding bugs.

Friday releases. In the perfect world, the release of a new version or feature is successful, everybody drinks champagne, go home satisfied with the work done. However, the reality could be different. From our experience software doesn’t normally release from the first time in 90% of cases. The best time for release is the beginning of the week. Thus it gives development and QA teams the rest of the week to deal with whatever comes up.

Wrong testing estimation. Yes, we also can make mistakes. While striving to make as an accurate estimate as possible, some software could be fully unpredictable. Thus estimation can go wrong. As developers, testers also don’t have a 100% protection from unforeseen issues.

Fixing bugs during testing. Software and QA engineers should work in close cooperation. Testing should be run once part of the development process is done. The same with fixing bugs: Testers submit a Bug Report and only after that debugging starts.

Everybody has fears. The point is how you feel about them. We fear not to do our work qualitatively. It drives us to double check everything.

Remember no matter what fear you have it can benefit you. So say boo to your fears and eat more candies 😉