31.7.08

Look for Bugs Where You've Already Found Them

There are two reasons to look for bugs in the areas where you've already found them:

· The more bugs you find, the more bugs there are. If you discover that you're finding lots of bugs at the upper boundary conditions across various features, it would be wise to emphasize testing these upper boundaries on all features. Of course you're going to test these anyway, but you might want to throw in a few special cases to make sure the problem isn't pervasive.

· Many programmers tend to fix only the specific bug you report. No more, no less. If you report a bug that starting, stopping, and restarting a program 255 times results in a crash, that's what the programmer will fix. There may have been a memory leak that caused the problem and the programmer found and fixed it. When you get the software back to retest, make sure you rerun the same test for 256 times and beyond. There could very well be yet another memory leak somewhere out there.