On bug prevention

I really enjoyed this blog. The main theme more or less was can bugs be prevented? He goes on to talk about how in testing we go at the software from many different angles looks for bugs, but just how often is it that we actually think about preventing them and are they actually inevitable and can they even be prevented in the first place? While bugs are inevitable he believes that they can be somewhat prevented and after reading his blog I believe he is right.

He goes on to explain the general things we can do about prevention such as better communication, trying to make less mistakes in the code, understanding the platform that is being worked on and the list goes on. The main question he asks is this; What can a tester do to help with bug prevention? Testing happens usually after the bug is already in place and it is the then too late to prevent the bug right? Well maybe not. He goes on to say that the testing and the results report can actually influence the teams thought in some areas or things. He says, “For example, something as ‘innocent’ as an email saying: ‘I’m planning some testing of feature X and I wanted to make sure I’m not duplicating work on this. What kind of unit tests have you done on this?’ can gently nudge coders to think about unit-testing their code (and the bug prevention benefits that come from writing code that is unit-testable in the first place).”

I really enjoyed this blog as he makes many good points and if I am ever in the tester role I will surely take some of his points to heart.

You can read the full blog here:

https://offbeattesting.com/2016/12/13/preventing-bugs/