Reviewing Bug Reports

Created and summarized by Brian Marick.

Some testing groups require that each bug report be reviewed before it's entered into the bug tracking system. I think that each time I've heard of this, it's been relatively informal. Rather than being a full-bore formal Inspection, it's more along the lines of "get someone else to read your bug report before you submit it".

I have little experience doing this. Danny Faught and I have been reviewing each other's bug reports on the AbiTest project. I have to say I've been pleased by the results - I think the quality of both our bug reports has improved. But I confess that I'm more than a bit of a bottleneck - it may take me days to get back to Danny. That seems like an inherent problem with the idea. Everyone's busy.

Another question, of course, is whether the improvement justifies the additional expense.

What has your experience been?

There is discussion in the Wiki Forum at page ReviewingBugReports.
(The Forum is explained in its FrontPage.)

Related Information

• There's more about handling bugs in the index of techniques.
• The WWW Formal Technical Review Archive is a good source of information about reviewing in general, with emphasis on more formal methods.
• Extreme Programming is a style of rapid development. One of its practices is pair programming, in which all code is written by two people sitting at a screen in a kind of real-time buddy review.

Summarized Discussion

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