128
votes
Accepted
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I would push back hard on this question.
An interview question is a machine designed to extract a signal from a candidate. Let's examine the parts of this machine.
"The most" has already been ...
- 1,273
92
votes
Found a minor bug, affecting 1% of users. What should QA do?
What I would do with any other bug - report it, write the bug report.
- 4,119
53
votes
Found a minor bug, affecting 1% of users. What should QA do?
1% of 100 users is a very different issue to 1% of 1,000,000 users - make your team and stakeholders aware of the issue (preferably in writing, with a defect report) and then they can make the ...
- 2,558
42
votes
What is your approach to low-priority bugs?
Some opinionated points from my experience, doing mostly development and operations with only a bit of QA and support, for the past few decades. Make of them as you will.
I don't think it matters if ...
- 521
30
votes
Found a minor bug, affecting 1% of users. What should QA do?
This is called Risk Analysis.
By the book, the over-simplified step is to analyze Impact x Frequency. Things that happen rarely but with huge impact can be prioritized, as well as things with little ...
- 11k
26
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
To be honest, I wouldn't be able to come up with any defect in particular.
If I were you, I'd rephrase my questions as situations, for example:
What actions would you take if you had to reopen a ...
- 5,894
26
votes
Found a minor bug, affecting 1% of users. What should QA do?
There's already 2 correct answers but I can't stress this enough.
You found a bug, you file a bug report.
It doesn't matter who it affects or how. It could conceivably affect 0 real users and still ...
- 361
19
votes
What are valid bugs
Take a deep breath
step back
and look at the big picture
Talk to folks / your boss about standards. Have a meeting. Agree on standards including items such as special characters. Take short term ...
- 25.2k
19
votes
What is your approach to low-priority bugs?
There is a third way, a middle of a road way, if you wish:
don't polute the backlog with many low priority bugs, but group them in an epic or a story that might hold them.
So, instead of having 20 low ...
- 4,119
15
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I am terrible at recalling names, places, restaurants, and... bugs I have investigated. I usually ask my girlfriend or my friend to give me a name of a place we have been together or an actress in a ...
- 10.5k
14
votes
Accepted
How bug prioritization works in agile projects vs non agile
A generic answer is: It's contextual; the team and stakeholders (which is who understand better the context) should work towards finding a good way - and periodically analysis its efficacy and improve ...
- 11k
14
votes
Accepted
What are valid bugs
One of the Context-Driven Testing principles is:
The product is a solution. If the problem isn’t solved, the product
doesn’t work.
Another way to say this is that software should work for its ...
- 11k
13
votes
What is your approach to low-priority bugs?
I go with reject and move-on.
The downside is that other folks and new folks will keep discovering the bug 'anew' and have to remember them in their head. Which sounds like a huge problem.
In ...
- 25.2k
13
votes
What is your approach to low-priority bugs?
You deal with them the same way as any other bug report. Review the bug and decide what (if anything) to do about it.
If you decide to do nothing, tag it in the bug database with "won't fix" ...
- 261
11
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I was asked a question like this at my last interview, and it took me a bit of time to think back and come up with a good answer. This was partly due to a dearth of experience - at that time I had ...
- 593
10
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I would say such a question might spotlight how deep the candidate understands the technologies, analyze the root-causes and is able to troubleshoot issues.
As per my experience I can remember ...
- 11.6k
10
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I don't know if I'm just too literal, but when I get asked these sort of questions, I get hung up on the word "most". It's not too hard to come with a bug, but making sure that I've never seen any ...
- 201
9
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I think it's an excellent question. I think it's likely to help you understand:
(a) what kind of technical challenges the interviewee is accustomed to dealing with. (Do they choose a programming ...
- 568
7
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
It's a great question because it separates code copiers/script kiddies from actual software engineers.
Example:
A well-known, very expensive piece of analytical software owned by a large company (I ...
7
votes
Defending corner cases
To expand on the other answers:
Note that something is a corner case - don't be afraid to note that an issue is a corner case and is being documented so that when a customer does encounter it, it's ...
- 31.5k
7
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
If you aren't getting good answers, then perhaps you can modify the question slightly to help the interviewee. The word "interesting" can be interpreted in so many different ways, and perhaps that is ...
- 171
7
votes
What is your approach to low-priority bugs?
Personally, I ask the other team members if such and such a problem is something we even want to deal with. If we agree it's not, I don't bother opening a new bug because obviously no one cares and I ...
- 4,548
7
votes
What is your approach to low-priority bugs?
I suggested this in the comments but figure it works just as well as an answer:
Keep the low priority bugs around, especially things that aren't hard to fix in principle. Use them as onboarding ...
- 171
6
votes
Accepted
How to sell a bug?
Well, the book Cem co-authored with James Bach and Bret Pettichord has a whole chapter on "Bug Advocacy". Some excerpts:
State the benefit so that your prospect will want it. Your bug report should ...
- 2,699
6
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I think it is an appropriate question to ask in an interview. I would restructure the question as what is the most interesting bug that you or your team found and what's the lesson learned? That way ...
- 69
6
votes
Found a minor bug, affecting 1% of users. What should QA do?
There are plenty of answers here talking about how all users matter. Essentially, this is a good reason to care about rare bugs, but I thought I would give a developer's perspective on some other ...
- 161
5
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
I've had a long enough career that I've seen and fixed many defects. It takes a real whopper these days to pique any genuine interest beyond that appropriate for efficiently characterizing and ...
- 151
5
votes
Accepted
Pareto Efficiency in Software Testing
Pareto Principle, originally described by Vilfredo Pareto and later formalized by Joseph Juran. In software testing this principle here is just a rule of thumb, but an important one.
80% of errors ...
- 1,272
5
votes
Most famous concurrency bugs?
There are two that come to mind: Therac-25 and the Northeast Blackout of 2003.
The Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine; there was a race condition that could cause the high-power electron beam ...
- 3,380
5
votes
Accepted
In an AGILE work environment, what kind of work should be classified as a bug to be fixed immediately?
There are many definitions of what is a bug and what not. For instance, Brian Kernighan once said:
Without specification, there are no bugs—only surprises.
However, I really like Zero-Bug Software ...
- 2,142
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible