The Secret Life of Bugs

This blog post is about The Secret Life of Bugs, a paper written by Jorge Aranda and Gina Venoila. It is available at ResearchGate.

Bugs always have a secret life behind them, bugs have a story to tell developers and testers every time they occur.

It is very important to keep a record of all the bugs encountered on a software. Keeping track of them, researches  (and developers too) can analyze the evolution of the software and analyze if there are any underlying circumstances that cause them.

Bug records are strongly related to the organization scheme on a company’s team. As in many cases, communication is the key to success. When managing bugs, it is important to notify members ASAP, so that involved parties can start working on it. Also, there needs to be a complete set of bug attributes that clearly defines the bug context. This context involves the code ownership, diagnosis, search, discovery, correction, closure and awareness. In the case of correction, it isn’t only fixing code, it is a complete procedure that involves updating user stories, documentation and maybe some other stuff.

When notifying bugs, there are several ways of conducting a meeting in order to do so. But they all depend on the company’s scheme. It also depends on how the bug is required to be fixed, not all bugs have the same course of action. Therefore, having several means to an end is a efficient way to independently deal with bugs.

When working on open source communities, or software, it is easy to keep track of all bug records, but at the same time, it is easy to lose the history of them because many people might report the same. In general, the article is based on the idea that a bug is not just faulty lines of code. Jorge and Gina treat bugs with a premise in which bugs can be treated as individuals with special requirements. All of the bugs have a different course of action and an specific way to be notified about.