Crouching Tester Hidden Defect – A Paper on Where Bugs Hide

Latest Whitepapers | Resource Centre | August 3, 2011

By Adam Hughes
Senior Test Consultant, Planit Software Testing

ABSTRACT: Bugs – just how many are there, and where do they hide? This paper looks at some of the different types of software bugs, what can lead to bugs occurring, where they might be hiding in your software, how many there could be, and how they can be found in the most efficient manner.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Testers knew where the bugs were going to be, before they started testing; if they could target certain areas of the code, even before they start designing test cases? Some organisations have a body of bugs that have been discovered on previous projects. Fewer have undertaken causal analysis against those bugs in order to understand their root causes. Fewer still have a catalogue of where each bug occurred, and can use that catalogue to identify where bugs are likely to occur on similar, future projects. A very small number of organisations can confidently predict how many bugs they need to find and fix, before it is safe to “go-live”. For other organisations, it’s a bit of a guess…

Kinds of Bugs
Boris Beizer is famous for his books and lectures on the topic of Software Testing. He is possibly most famous for initiating the largest study into bugs ever undertaken1. The study looked at tens of thousands of bugs across the software development industry over a period of a decade, and found that there were less than 200 bugs in the Software World, but that these same bugs were constantly repeated across industries, and around the Globe. The bugs studied fell into the following high-level categories …

Download Full Whitepaper