Skip to main content

Errors by any Other Name


You say "defect", the customer hears "defective" and the developers anticipate blame. You say "failure", the customer hears "catastrophe" and the tech support staff anticipate overtime. You say "own goal" and the customer wonders what you're talking about and you anticipate an imminent conversation with your boss.

As an industry we use many different names for bugs, including anomaly, call, crash, defect, DR, enhancement, error, events, exception, failure, fault, flaw, incident, issue, mistake, own goal, problem, side effect, suggestion, ticket, TR (collected from 1, 2, 3, 4). But surely it's as Shakespeare never said:
What's in a name? That which we call errors
By any other name would smell as sweat;
Really? What exactly are we talking about here? I like the broad Rapid Software Testing take on what a bug is:
A bug is anything about the product that threatens its value.
The BBST Bug Advocacy course has something similar:
Anything that causes an unnecessary or unreasonable reduction of the quality of a software product 
finessing the idea by introducing the notion that there can be reasonable or necessary (to people who matter) compromises in a product, and that these might not be regarded as bugs.

Multiple names exist for many reasons including: because language is productive (e.g. metonymy, synonymy), because the distinctions are required or useful in some situations, because they're taken from the tool used to manage them, because of misunderstandings, because of tradition, because of culture, because of migration of words from one person or project, or company or industry to another.

And some of the names here are probably not widely used as synonyms for bugs as a whole. Some are sub-classes of bugs, for example suggestion, crash and side-effect. Some are potential attributes of many sub-classes, such as regression or blocker. Some refer to the artefacts produced in the recording or acknowledgement of an issue and which, strictly, are distinct from its existence: ticket, call, report, incident and the like.

Does it matter that we have so many names, anyway? Put simply: yes, sometimes. People are highly attuned to nuances of meaning and also, more pertinently, to forming opinions based on their interpretation of a simple word. If you don't believe me, sit in a meeting where a product or a company name  is being decided. The choice of term for (let's say) an issue can be interpreted as, amongst other things:
  • Attributing blame for the issue, e.g. to a person, software component, process or company. Anne-Marie Charrett  doesn't use "the word defect because of the impact the word has on a developers ears. No-one likes to hear their code is defective, much better is a bug or an issue." When I was a technical support manager, I made it policy never to refer to problems reported by customers as bugs (to the customer) instead we used the word issue, largely to avoid implicitly attributing blame to our product before investigation.
  • Providing a value judgement on the issue, e.g. the existence of a defect as agreeing that the product is defective. When I attended Rapid Software Testing, James Bach was against using the word defect because of potential legal implications.
  • Designating a severity or priority of the issue to e.g. you, a stakeholder, your company, your customer. For example, compare your reaction to being told there's an incoming suggestion vs a failure. Similarly, the term used might identify a point in the time that the issue will be scheduled for resolution, e.g. an enhancement vs a blocker.
  • Marking the issue as core or a symptom,  e.g. a UI issue could be bad logic in the underlying model or bad rendering of the model. Jerry Weinberg makes a distinction between fault (an underlying issue) and failure (a manifestation of the fault) in Quality Software Management and other books. The BBST Bug Advocacy course makes error and fault synonyms and permits defect to cover both error and failure.
  • Identifying a point in the production process that the issue was generated. The August 2013 issue of TEST magazine differentiates flaw (a design problem) from bug (coding error) while on the Software Testing Club forum, Chad Patrick noted a definition of error as "a problem created, found, and resolved during the same phase. So a bug introduced in code and caught during a peer review or unit test, an incorrect requirement uncovered and resolved during a static analysis during analysis, etc." Fiona Charles suggests that defect has a pair term rarely used in software: "[the construction industry] also uses the term deficiency, to mean (approximately) things we should have built but didn't - in contrast with defect, meaning things we built that don't match spec."
There's some discussion on the STC about whether we need industry standardisation on these kinds of terms. I don't think we do, although it's clear that there's a set of words that have loaded meanings in some circumstances and in any dialogue that requires non-shallow understanding, those terms are going to have to be defined.

As usual, context is the guiding factor. The people you're talking to, the relationship you have with them, the kind of problem you're discussing about the kind of thing that you're building or supporting, how you're discussing it need to be understood by both sides, or you'll start to see issues, mistakes, errors, problems ...
Labels:

Comments

  1. Jari LaaksoSeptember 20, 2013 at 10:59 AM

    What a wonderful post, thanks!

    "When I was a technical support manager, I made it policy never to refer to problems reported by customers as bugs (to the customer) instead we used the word issue, largely to avoid implicitly attributing blame to our product before investigation."

    I like to say "a bug is something that bugs someone who matters at some time", thus I would have called those as bugs. So one more side to the whole discussion!

    Keep 'em coming!


    Best regards,
    Jari

    ReplyDelete
  2. James ThomasSeptember 20, 2013 at 9:35 PM

    @Jari: Glad you enjoyed it, cheers.

    Depending on the cause(s) we'd call them bugs internally. In tech support, there's often a factors outside the responsibility or control of the product that could influence the product's behaviour.

    For me, in that role, "issue" seemed to more closely encompass any "something that bugs someone" and was neutral on the cause, while "bug" seemed more strictly related to our product.

    To give an example of the kind of thing that motivated this thought: if the product failed to run because Java wasn't installed and the customer sent in a tech support request, there may be a bug - perhaps our product wasn't clear enough about its dependencies or reporting the reason that it can't run - but the issue that needs resolving is that the customer must have Java, something that would be fixed by someone outside our company.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jari LaaksoSeptember 21, 2013 at 2:11 AM

    Oh, look at that! You just gave a whole lot of context for this small remark (about my experience). I think you could have written a blog post about each of the "claims" you had. Very very nice!

    Can't wait to read the next entry!

    Enjoy the weekend!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Michael Bolton http://www.developsense.comAugust 9, 2015 at 3:41 AM

    One of my offerings here: http://www.developsense.com/blog/2014/04/ive-had-it-with-defects/

    ---Michael B.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes on Testing Notes

Ben Dowen pinged me and others on Twitter last week , asking for "a nice concise resource to link to for a blog post - about taking good Testing notes." I didn't have one so I thought I'd write a few words on how I'm doing it at the moment for my work at Ada Health, alongside Ben. You may have read previously that I use a script to upload Markdown-based text files to Confluence . Here's the template that I start from: # Date + Title # Mission # Summary WIP! # Notes Then I fill out what I plan to do. The Mission can be as high or low level as I want it to be. Sometimes, if deeper context might be valuable I'll add a Background subsection to it. I don't fill in the Summary section until the end. It's a high-level overview of what I did, what I found, risks identified, value provided, and so on. Between the Mission and Summary I hope that a reader can see what I initially intended and what actually
4 comments
Read more

Enjoy Testing

  The testers at work had a lean coffee session this week. One of the questions was  "I like testing best because ..." I said that I find the combination of technical, intellectual, and social challenges endlessly enjoyable, fascinating, and stimulating. That's easy to say, and it sounds good too, but today I wondered whether my work actually reflects it. So I made a list of some of the things I did in the last working week: investigating a production problem and pairing to file an incident report finding problems in the incident reporting process feeding back in various ways to various people about the reporting process facilitating a cross-team retrospective on the Kubernetes issue that affected my team's service participating in several lengthy calibration workshops as my team merges with another trying to walk a line between presenting my perspective on things I find important and over-contributing providing feedback and advice on the process identifying a
Post a Comment
Read more

Risk-Based Testing Averse

  Joep Schuurkes started a thread on Twitter last week. What are the alternatives to risk-based testing? I listed a few activities that I thought we might agree were testing but not explicitly driven by a risk evaluation (with a light edit to take later discussion into account): Directed. Someone asks for something to be explored. Unthinking. Run the same scripted test cases we always do, regardless of the context. Sympathetic. Looking at something to understand it, before thinking about risks explicitly. In the thread , Stu Crook challenged these, suggesting that there must be some concern behind the activities. To Stu, the writing's on the wall for risk-based testing as a term because ... Everything is risk based, the question is, what risks are you going to optimise for? And I see this perspective but it reminds me that, as so often, there is a granularity tax in c
Post a Comment
Read more

Agile Testing Questioned

Zenzi Ali has been running a book club on the Association for Software Testing Slack and over the last few weeks we've read Agile Testing Condensed by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin. Each chapter was taken as a jumping off point for one or two discussion points and I really enjoyed the opportunity to think about the questions Zenzi posed and sometimes pop a question or two back into the conversation as well. This post reproduces the questions and my answers, lightly edited for formatting. --00-- Ten principles of agile testing are given in the book. Do you think there is a foundational principle that the others must be built upon? In your experience, do you find that some of these principles are less or more important than others?  The text says they are for a team wanting to deliver the highest-quality product they can. If we can regard a motivation as a foundational principle, perhaps that could be it: each of the ten pr
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Post Office Scandal

  The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis is a depressing, dispiriting, and disheartening read. For anyone that cares about fairness and ethics in the relationship that business and technology has with individuals and wider society, at least. As a software tester working in the healthcare sector who has signed up to the ACM code of ethics through my membership of the Association for Software Testing I put myself firmly in that camp. Wallis does extraordinarily well to weave a compelling and readable narrative out of a years-long story with a large and constantly-changing cast and depth across subjects ranging from the intensely personal to extremely technical, and through procedure, jurisprudence, politics, and corporate governance. I won't try to summarise that story here (although Wikipedia takes a couple of stabs at it ) but I'll pull out a handful of threads that I think testers might be interested in: The unbelievable naivety which lead to Horizon (the system at th
2 comments
Read more

Leaps and Boundary Objects

Brian Marick  recently launched a new podcast, Oddly Influenced . I said this about it on Twitter: Boundary Objects, the first episode of @marick's podcast, is thought-provoking and densely-packed with some lovely turns of phrase. I played it twice in a row. Very roughly, boundary objects are things or concepts that help different interest groups to collaborate by being ambiguous enough to be meaningful and motivational to all parties. Wikipedia  elaborates, somewhat formally:  [boundary objects are] both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites ... The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds. The podcast talks about boundary objects in general and then applies the idea to software development specifically, casting acceptance test
Post a Comment
Read more

Where No-one Else Looks

In yesterday's post, Optimising start of your exploratory testing , Maaret Pyhäjärvi lists anti-patterns she's observed in testers that can lead to shallow outcomes of testing. She ends with this call: Go find (some of) what the others have missed! That strikes a chord. In Toujours Testing I recalled how my young daughter, in her self-appointed role as a Thing Searcher, had asked me how she could find things that no-one else finds. I replied Look where no-one else looks. Which made her happy, but also made me happy because that instinctive response externalised something that had previously been internal.  The phrase has stuck, too, and I recall it when I'm working. It doesn't mean targeting the obscure, although it can mean that.  It also doesn't mean not looking at areas that have previously been covered, although again it can mean that. More, for me, it is about seeking levels of granularity, or perspectives, or methods of engagement, or personas, or data, or im
Post a Comment
Read more

External Brains

A month or two ago, after seeing how I was taking notes and sharing information, a colleague pointed me at Tiego Forte's blog on Building a Second Brain : [BASB is] a methodology for saving and systematically reminding us of the ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections we’ve gained through our experience. It expands our memory and our intellect... That definitely sounded like my kind of thing so I ordered the upcoming book, waited for it to arrive, and then read it in a couple of sittings. Very crudely, I'd summarise it something like this: notes are atomic items, each one a single idea, and are not just textual notes should capture what your gut tells you could be valuable notes should capture what you think you need right now notes should preserve important context for restarting work notes on a topic are bundled in a folder for a Project, Area, or Resource and moved into Archive when they're done. ( PARA )
Post a Comment
Read more

Binary Oppositions

I am totally loving Oddly Influenced, Brian Marick's new podcast. The latest episoide covers ways in which schools of thought and practice can inhibit the cross-fertilisation of ideas.  It includes a case study in experimental physics from Peter Galison's book, Image and Logic , where two different approaches to the same particle analysis problem seem to run on separate, parallel tracks: In the 'head to world' tradition, you use your head to carefully construct situations that allow the world to express its subtle truths ... In the 'world to head' tradition, you make yourself ever more sensitive to the world’s self-expressed truths ... The first of these wants to theorise and then craft an experiment using statistics while the latter wants to gather data and try to understand it visually. Marick is pessimistic about the scope for crossover in this kind of situation: How do you bridge traditions that differ on aesthetics, on different standards of what counts as
Post a Comment
Read more

Result!

Last night I attended a Consequence Scanning workshop at the Cambridge Tester Meetup . In it, Drew Pontikis walked us through the basics of an approach for identifying opportunities and risks and selecting which ones to target for exploitation or mitigation. The originators of Consequence Scanning recommend that it's run as part of planning and design activities with the outcomes being specific actions added to a backlog and a record of all of the suggested consequences for later review. So, acting as a product team for the Facebook Portal pre-launch, we  listed potential intended and unintended consequences sorted them into action categories (control, influence, or monitor) chose several consequences to work on explored possible approaches for the action assigned to each selected consequence In the manual there are various resources for prompting participants to think broadly and laterally about consequences. For example, a product can have an effect on people other than its u
Post a Comment
Read more