I keep letting bugs go live on purpose. What should I do?

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1

I keep letting bugs go live on purpose.

I can’t stop myself.

I get a kick out of it.

Am I a bad person?

Am I a rogue tester?

What should I do?

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2

If you are a zoologist then this is a natural response but if you’re a software tester you should consider your professional ethics

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3

Questions you can ask yourself:

  1. Are you hesitant to discuss bugs with your team?
  2. Do you fear that if you report any bugs, someone in the team might throw a tantrum on the delays?
  3. Do you fear that the top most boss of the product might think your team is not skilled enough due to their short-comings in software development?
  4. You get a kick out of it, think about this scenario:
  • You’re using your bank’s app to pay your rent
  • A software tester, just like you, thinks that this bug can go to production no issues
  • The bug here is that when you hit the send button, the money doesn’t go to your landlord but to the first person in your alphabetically sorted list of beneficiaries
  • Now, due to that tester leaving out a bug like this on production, you lost your money.
  • Just like this there’s someone out there who relies heavily on the software you test and if you can be just a little bit more careful you will reduce a headache for lots of people.
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4

Maybe Brian’s mum from Life of Brian would have a better view.

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5

maybe it’s time to go to a psychotherapist :sweat_smile: if you can’t stop doing it. Maybe you have some exceptional motivations for doing so, if this is the case then explain it to us :slight_smile:

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6

… Yes, the worst sort.

… Change job roles and become a developer.

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7

Then you could be a sort of a hero - by creating more bugs you are creating more work and new job opportunities for others! :sweat_smile:

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8

‘I keep letting bugs go live on purpose.’
I did that too. I rarely had the choice to do more about them besides informing managers and advocating for risky/critical bugs.
I think that’s better than not finding them in the first place and letting them go live undetected, by professional negligence.

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Sounds like your managers were the negligent ones!

10

Why would you say that? A manager leaving bugs knowingly in production is fine as long as they do it for the progress of the company and business(or forced by their managers/C-levels).
Most of the agile-developed products work that way as far as I can tell. There’s a first MVP release with a bunch of bugs and missing features. Fix them for the following years.
A good example of throwing ‘bugs’ to prod is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/1co6iy2/the_new_sonos_app_feedback_megathread/

For some companies something might change, for others not so much.

11

I guess it depends on the context of the bug, if an employee regardless of level/role knowingly puts a bug into prod that could cause harm or damage to the system it is absolutely negligent and depending on the damage caused could result in anything from reputational damage to a prison sentence.

Using Sonos as an example is fine, but would you feel that this approach was OK if say Boeing left a bug in their plane control systems that could cause a plane to fall out of the sky?