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
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 ...
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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
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 ...
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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 ...
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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" ...
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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 ...
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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
Accepted
Can a performance issue be defined as blocking bug?
This is not QA decision but business decision. If performance is satisfactory for the customer - it is good enough.
Also remember that the most important speed is speed to the market - deliver most ...
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 ...
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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
8
votes
How to convince the developer a bug exists but is not reproducible?
The answer, as suggested by comments, is quite easy.
You cannot fix something that you cannot duplicate. Period.
I have been on both sides of this issue and I can tell you that it's frustrating for ...
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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
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 ...
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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
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 ...
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5
votes
Can a performance issue be defined as blocking bug?
The question of whether a performance bug is a blocker depends entirely on whether it stops a user from doing whatever they are trying to do with the software.
I have worked on software that took ...
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 ...
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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
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 ...
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4
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
Yes, this is a good question to ask.
If the person you are asking is really fond of testing he would be very excited to tell you the story. It does not matter whether he is a Manual Tester or an ...
- 2,275
4
votes
How to convince the developer a bug exists but is not reproducible?
If you are sure this is a bug you have to reproduce it and there is the only way to convince your dev mate that the application code has a defect. Here is some advice on that:
Consider the execution ...
- 11.6k
4
votes
How bug prioritization works in agile projects vs non agile
In more traditional software development cycles, defects are found during a testing phase and in production by users. Defects would be logged in a defect tracker. Depending on the severity of the ...
- 32.6k
4
votes
What are valid bugs
For an API, I would consider this a bug. An application is possibly going to be parsing the text so it should be the same for any invalid project name.
However, as a backend developer myself, it's ...
3
votes
Is asking about "The most interesting bug in your career" a good interview question?
Interviewing testers is very tricky, the ones you want are the ones that are interviewing you.
Be aware that client confidentiality will prevent them from telling you about their most juicy bug, ...
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