The Subtle Art of Bug Prevention (and not just finding them)

The Subtle Art of Bug Prevention (and not just finding them): Tales of Testers from Moolympics #1

“How many bugs have you found?”

This simple question casually floats around all the testers’ circle giving each of us some bragging rights.?

But beyond the mere number of bugs, we find, there is a story. A story about how and why.?

How did you happen to find the bug? And, more importantly, why was the bug there in the first place??

We, as testers, often limit ourselves to the role of detecting bugs in a code. However, there are some game-changers in the testing world.? During ‘Moolympics#1: How I/we prevented Bugs’ we received some fascinating responses. Among the plethora of interesting experience reports we have selected 5 remarkable winners in the form of Pooja Shah , Geosley Andrades , Sowmya Tuniki , Rahul Parwal , and Jyoti Mishra .?

These innovative testers walked the extra mile because they had a premonition that something might go wrong. Even before it actually happened. Even before the bug surfaced and made itself visible.?

And that’s the art of Bug Prevention!

A certain knack of taking preemptive measures and making a huge impact on the business. Because testing is finally all about making a measurable business impact. And that should be the mantra for all of us Testers.?

What would’ve happened if the Bug was Not Prevented??

Bug prevention is all about saving the product, technology, and business from an immediate or future catastrophe. Thereby saving a lot of revenue for the client.?

During this competition, We received a lot of intriguing responses which you either as a tester or as a product owner will find equally stimulating.?

“All of our customers would have suffered over the different intervals when their usage flow would have hit the buggy backend. And fixing them could have been a mess that would’ve lasted for months. And not mention the impact of losing customer's trust”? explains Test Leader Pooja Shah

While Pooja’s experience denotes an impact on customer trust, Exploratory Tester Geosley Andrades directly talks about the financial loss he has saved his client from by mentioning,?

“With enormous trading transactions happening every minute, this would have been a huge financial loss to the organization amounting to millions”

Test Engineer, Soumya Tuniki takes more of a philosophical route in explaining the state of things that might’ve fallen apart if the bug was not prevented.?

“Ah! nightmare after nightmare. A bug that haunts you for months. Oh!! you better want to fix it but what if you can't fix it, you just need to prevent it forever”

Yes, prevention is certainly better than cure. And Test Engineer, Rahul Parwal is best at articulating things in the form of a list

“If these bugs were not prevented, we would have spent a lot of extra time in:

1. The back and forth between the two teams after finding the bugs in the product.?
2. Correcting system design and making implementation changes to accommodate the new design.?
3. Additional testing cycles at our end”?

Test Engineer, Jyoti Mishra cited the case of her preventing bugs for a fintech client as she points out the exact areas which would’ve been affected if the proactive measures were not taken by her.?

“If we had not followed this proactive approach it would have affected our GMV and also SRT of existing integrations”?

Surely there was a mixed bag of testing sentiments but all the responses of the remarkable testers resonated around a similar theme. They’ve prevented tech debt and hence revenue loss for their clients.?

Now before we go into the impact analysis let’s find out what it takes to become a bug-preventing thought leader in the business.?

What Does It Take to Prevent Bugs??

A tester dons many hats. A tester needs to adapt to changing domains, technology, and client expectations.?

In their truest sense, a tester needs to be a Generalist.?

The thought leaders have listed down a lot of key skills that they needed for being effective bug preventers.?

They said that they were required to be vigilant, and curious. Have some domain understanding. Have a? lot of context understanding. And a mix and match of critical thinking, communication skills, proactiveness, and some knowledge of coding.?

To sum it up, all of them needed to take ownership of the project they were working on. And that’s what makes a tester.?

Tangible Impact of Bug Prevention on Product and Business?

As we said before, testing is all about making a measurable impact on the product and consequently on the business.?

Whether it’s all about saving time, gaining customer confidence, or adding revenue, the act of bug prevention ultimately boils down to enhancing the value for the customers.?

Speaking about the fintech client, Jyoti elaborates, “We are able to integrate more Debit card EMI on our checkout page and quicker time and we are getting requests for revamping some older integrations as well”

Time is certainly a parameter for measuring impact. And so is revenue.?

On this note, Geosley reveals that as a result of that timely bug prevention, they had made sure that they keep poised on their Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) with no client impact.?

Talking about gaining customer trust, Pooja revealed that preventing the bug has ensured that the customers loved the product and the app ratings soared high. Thereby directly contributing to the business growth.?

Rahul in his impact statement talked about the overall efficiency of the production cycle which in turn offered them a scope to indulge in quality improvement and innovation.?

And Soumya took an interesting view and said how the single act of bug prevention has actually yielded better communication and trust between the front-end and back-end teams.?

So we have trust, revenue, time, and communication. Four very vital elements define the culture of success of a business. And testers have played a pivotal role in ensuring all of that.?

Creating a Culture of Change?

Now going forward, as testers, if you want to enjoy some bragging rights then instead of talking about the number of bugs, let’s talk about the impact of the bugs you’ve prevented.?

*This competition was held in January 2021 and was judged by Pradeep Soundararajan , Chief Servant to Employees & Customers Moolya Testing along with Abhijeet Vaikar , Senior Software Engineer in Test, Carousell. First, of its kind, this event attracted a lot of attention from the testing community and we received plenty of responses. This article is a compilation of the answers shared by the winners, published with their permission.?