The launching of the software is scheduled for tomorrow but suddenly you notice a couple of not-so-critical bugs. You are now in a fix as to whether you still want to continue with your launch of the software the next day?

This is the most common scenario faced by the testers. As a tester, you may wonder whether you need to be involved in this kind of decision-making. Your job is to report a bug. That’s it! Right?

I asked a few testers about their thoughts regarding this issue.

One tester said that the decision is totally situational:

If project is already under UAT and a high severity bug is found two days before its release, it is release management’s call to decide whether to fix that bug and then release the product or wait for service pack with the fix for the bug. However, if the bug is not critical, it is not a good idea to fix it at the last moment.

Another tester felt that ROI is the most important determining factor:

There can be bugs that exist in a feature and are not oftenly used in an application. In such cases, even if it doesn’t work well, there will be no complaints as it is hard to find those issues at the first instance. Or maybe, the issues are found, but are unlikely to occur. It isn’t worthwhile to pay thousands of dollars to get them fixed.

It was quite surprising, that nobody came out and said that all bugs should be fixed before release. Are testers becoming more practical these days? A common result of the above discussion is that – testers don’t have the final say. It is the management’s decision. They can and should be a part in the final decision- making-process.

Well, it is a tester’s job to discover a bug and make everybody aware of the consequences of not fixing it. Simply, a tester is not only a part of developer’s team but is also a user representative.

Posted by-

Ritu Bhatt

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