localization and registration of defects” by Olga Nazina
At one time, the author was impressed by the series of richly illustrated books “Head First”, published by O'Reilly Media (USA). The guiding principle of this series is to help readers learn material faster, easier, and more effectively. Head First books make extensive use of comics and other visual elements on every page to help illustrate and explain the material. All that remains is to praise Olga for heroically following this style in her testing books, despite the enormous labor-intensive nature of the drawings and the difficulty of cooperating with a team of freelance artists.
Enter promotional code SSPSOFT from our blog to purchase books by Olga Nazina with a 25% discount on the publisher's website. Printed books are published in black and white, and electronic books are published in color. At the time of publication of this article, PDF versions were only for the first two books (releases 2022 and 2023), because… The publisher usually holds the electronic version for several months so that pirates do not steal it for their resources, devaluing the work of the author and publisher.
What is bug tracking and why is it needed?
Bug tracking is an integral part of the software testing process. It is the tester's job to detect, record, track and manage bugs (errors) found in the application during testing.
Effective bug tracking provides a structured approach to identifying, documenting, and resolving bugs. It helps development and testing teams clearly understand what issues exist, their priorities, statuses, and change history.
For a QA specialist, bug tracking skills are of paramount importance, because… competent design and description of defects allows developers to quickly reproduce and fix the problem. Clearly locating the error and providing necessary information such as reproduction steps, test data, and screenshots makes the debugging process easier.
Bug trackers or bug tracking systems are applications that provide a centralized repository for recording bugs, assigning people responsible for fixing bugs, tracking statuses and managing the life cycle of these tasks.
Let's get acquainted with the Table of Contents
The table of contents of the book is located at the end, which is quite unusual for publications on computer topics. I was surprised – today they only do this in fiction, and because of this arrangement, the table of contents was not included in the trial piece (preview) on the publisher’s website.
Therefore, let's add a review of the table of contents to the review – and, for brevity, limit ourselves to a close-up of the book at the chapter level.
From the author
Characters
PART I. Introductory 13
Chapter 1. What is a bug? 15
Chapter 2. How to add tasks to the bug tracker? 33
PART II. Error localization 55
Chapter 3. How to localize errors? 57
Chapter 4. How to understand whether the error is on the client or the server? . 73
Chapter 5. Logs in bug localization 89
Chapter 6. How to find the minimum data to reproduce a bug? 111
Chapter 7. Localization examples 127
Chapter 8. Total about localization. 157
PART III. Formatting tasks 159
Chapter 9. Title design 161
Chapter 10. Description of the bug 175
Chapter 11. Description of the improvement 201
Chapter 12. How to correctly insert an attachment into a task? . 213
Chapter 13. Additional fields 225
Chapter 14. Patterns and antipatterns of problem justification 237
Chapter 15. Examples of task formatting 271
Chapter 16. Total about registration 281
PART IV. Processes and tools 287
Chapter 17. The bug tracking process 289
Chapter 18. Bug tracking tools 299
Chapter 19. Workflow – task life cycle 305
Chapter 20. How to close tasks? 313
Chapter 21: Retrospective Error Analysis 319
Chapter 22. Afterword 331
PART V. Applications
Appendix 1. Cheat sheet from Pavel
Appendix 2. UFO Poster (find, localize and file an error)
What's in the bottom line
The book is divided into four main parts and many chapters and sections devoted to specific topics. In the first part, the author defines the main terms – bug, error, defect, and also explains how to enter tasks into the bug tracker. The second part is entirely devoted to the process of localizing errors – how to find them, identify the source of the problem, use logs and test data.
The third part examines the design of tasks in detail: how to write informative names, describe reproduction steps, attach screenshots and justify the necessary changes. Practical examples and antipatterns are provided. The fourth part discusses bug tracking processes, task life cycle, tools and recommendations for closing tickets.
More detailed examples of chapter content can be found on the author’s website: Bug tracking: localization and registration of defects (book) | testbase.ru
Pros and cons (in my opinion)
An obvious plus — the book is written in a very lively and accessible language, using humor and relevant examples. The pictures really enliven the text and give a good mood throughout the book. The author draws extensively on his extensive practical experience in the field of software testing. The material is presented sequentially, with gradual complication from basic concepts to more complex ones.
I can’t attribute this to disadvantages, since it’s a matter of personal perception, but it seemed to me that the emotional dialogues of the characters take up too much space in the book, but since there are a lot of girls in QA, they will probably like it, on the contrary.
Minus on the case — if I studied testing, then I would not have enough description of working with at least one bug tracking application. The author mentions that he mainly uses Jira (it’s not very clear how this works after the company left the Russian market), and also uses the free Redmine. It is clear that the description of using the application will take a separate chapter, or even more than one, and this section may quickly become outdated due to the application being updated. But just listing the names of bug tracking tools was not enough for me.
In general, the book can be recommended to beginning and practicing testers, developers and anyone involved in handling bugs and tracking tasks in software development. It will be a good help for increasing the efficiency of bug tracking and improving communication between participants in the development process.
If you want to buy a paper book in color as a gift, the author sells such publications himself, on their courses website. Unfortunately, the discount from our blog does not apply there.
I’ll add a drop of advertising from our blog: the SSP SOFT company invites you to QA engineer positions and DevOps, systems analyst, Java, React and Python developers, 1C – see. page on hh.ru. If your specialty is not listed in current vacancies, send your resume anyway, because… new positions in teams open weekly (write to Telegram or by mail job@ssp-soft.com).
And a poster to go with it
From useful additional material from Olga Nazina – you can download the author's layout of a color poster for free “UFO (find, localize and file an error)”. You can take the poster yourself to a print bureau like “Bright World” and print it there on a color printer in A1 format. Then hang it on the wall and refer to the poster when bugs occur, and also use it as a talisman to lift your spirits by looking at funny characters.
Good luck in mastering the testing profession!
