September 16, 2013

RIMGEA: A Bug reporting Heuristic

Last week I looked at a heuristic that helped me with testing, and planning my testing. It even helped me with isolating a bug and replicating it. If that was all that I did, it might be the only heuristic that I need in my daily work. (Un?)Fortunately I also find bugs, and bug reports are one of the main forms of written communication that exists for me or my team. Thus, a well written bug report that has all of the elements can be important, or at least as important as the bug we are reporting.

This week I'm going to concentrate on writing better bug reports by using the RIMGEA heuristic. This heuristic developed by Cem Kaner and gives the user a series of steps to go through to ensure that a bug report has enough information that others can correctly evaluate and prioritize the bug you are reporting.

R, Replicate: Ideally all bugs that we report are replicable, we might not understand all the variables involved in the bug yet, but in order to move on in this heuristic the bug needs to have a series of steps that will replicate the bug.  If it doesn't we need to spend some time coming up with some steps. If these steps only sometimes replicate the bug, try to refine them so that it can consistently replicate the bug or at least describe how often these steps can replicate the bug.  Sometimes how often a bug can be replicated using the same steps is an important piece of information.

I, Isolate: Any given set of replication steps will have any number of things that just happen to be that way, but the bug doesn't need them.  Identify these elements so that we know what is really involved in the bug. This step will help with the next two.

M, Maximize: This is to find out just how bad this could be if everything went exactly wrong.  The version of the bug that you have discovered or have been asked to improve the report for is not likely the worst case version. Since you have isolated the bug you should be able to determine how to make the effect greater.

G, Generalize: This goes part and parcel with Maximize and Isolate.  Since we know what the isolation is and how to maximize it, the other side of this coin is what is the easiest version of the steps, or what is the most common path a user could follow to trigger this bug.

E, Externalize: This one is important, not to the bug, but to your ability to inform others of the effect of the bug. To externalize, you describe the impact of the bug to the users, their data and their ability to complete the task that they are trying to complete with this application.

And blandize: Ok, they stretched it on this one to make it an A, but it is an important aspect of any bug report. To find a way to report your bug without making it personal. They could have used O for objective there also and it might have made it clearer to the users

Interestingly, I filed a bug report for work while writing this blog post. My bug reports will have to change a lot to this week. It's not that my bug reports are incomplete, I feel that I write them to the appropriate level of detail for who will need to read them. However, I didn't do some of these steps. It should be interesting.

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