Last week, one permanent employee came over to my desk and bluntly told me that I was raising too many bugs in Jira.
A large number of bugs are putting him in a very difficult position as his manager wanted to cut down the number of bugs instead of seeing them increase.
How should I resolve this situation?
You should always try to do your job and perform good whenever it's possible. Unfortunately if you are finding issues (which is your job) that will always mean that developer/designer (or someone else) didn't complete task in a proper manner.
You shouldn't feel bad or guilty because you are doing what is asked from you. If the product is not good and you fail to report it, fault is entirely up to you because you didn't detect the flaw.
If the product is not good or ready (for some deadline), that means that project manager and people in charge didn't properly allocate the resources and enough people that could finish this job and in that case it's not again your responsibility.
Eventually if you see that problems is not solving quick enough, you can postpone reporting some very minor issues, to cover temporarily faults of another people but you should try to avoid this if it can backfire on you.
Try talking to that colleague and ask him for solution of the problem and see if you can help in any way that is in your job description (maybe to pinpoint issue, rather than detecting there is a issue). But if he only wants you to cover his inability to finish the task (to much work on him, not enough time or he is not good enough), than you will have issue with him but you need to stay transparent and focused on performing your job tasks no matter what.
Try talking with other colleagues to see if you can get information about previous situation how it was handled in the past and try to apply to this situation if possible or talk with your manager for guidance and advice.
Either way there are too many variables in this situation and too little information for someone else outside your job to give you a proper advice but no matter what, you always should do the job that you are responsible for.
Let your manager handle this, it is their job.
I would respond:
Sorry, I will look into that.
My action:
Talk to my manager, get his/her take on things. Review if the bugs you are logging are valid.
That's really it. I do not recommend further talking to the employee involved because they need education and are not going to suddenly learn from a 1:1 conversation where they have already shown themselves to be aggressive and ignorant - I mean that only technically, they may be the nicest person in the world socially. A casual 1:1 at this point has high potential for an escalating argument.
Bear in mind that their criticism could come from defending their personal work, or could come from feeling that the bugs are being logged are incorrect, regardless of developer who wrote the code, and should not be logged which is quite a different aspect.
You should start with a conversation with the developer to ask why he thinks there are too many bugs and see if there is a different approach possible.
For example, if you are reporting a similar bug/bugs with each new build - perhaps consider helping the developer create a unit test or check before he produces the build.
If he says that you are reporting many symptoms of the same underlying bug, maybe the answer is grouping the symptoms into one bug report, or to revise existing bugs.
If the product is truly that buggy, then the leaders (test & dev managers) really should know and take more actions.
Ultimately, the goal is to produce great software, the bug reporting is an administrative process to help achieve that goal - don't let it get in the way of delivering great software.
Everyone has very well explained, how you should handle this scenario. And trust me; at some point almost every tester come across similar situation.
So, my suggestion is:
1. Don't get upset about it. And don't get discouraged. Keep yourself motivated.
2. Ideally, project team (which includes both developers and testers) is responsible for delivering high quality end product. So, QA should not be discouraged from raising bugs. Even if he is not logging bugs in a particular way, then message should be passed politely ensuring that QA doesn't get discouraged.
I had a QA friend who faced similar situation. He talked to his manager about it. Manager reviewed the defects logged by him and suggested to club the similar bugs into 1.
My friend was doing a great job and reporting everything that was valid.
But, after this incident, he changed a lot. He would quickly give up any discussion around bugs with the development team, instead of bringing in logical points in the discussion. Sometimes, he would give in to the pressure from developers and even once closed the bugs under pressure.
These things are not good.
So, just wanted to share this with you. Whatever happens, just stay strong and keep reporting bugs as you have always done so far.
You have to do your job whether this particular developer like it or not. And from my experience of working with developers, I can confidently tell you that good developers always encourage the tester to raise bugs. I have instances where even developers ask you to log a bug if they see any unexpected behavior. And this is how it should be. The end goal for both developers and testers is to improve the quality together
