Mastering the Art of Reproducing Non-Reproducible Bugs

In our day-to-day life, we all have various tasks to complete. Some of them are easy and the remaining is counted as Challenges. A software defect once found should be reproducible so that the tester can report it with conviction, a developer can fix it with ease and the Quality Assurance (QA) team can close with confidence.

Being software testers, we also face some challenges, such as Non-Reproducible bugs. Bugs that are not easy or cannot be reproduced again are termed as Non-Reproducible bugs which we often find harder to isolate and to get them to fix becomes a difficult task.

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A software tester should provide Steps to Reproduce a Bug to make the Developer task easy and to not affect the deliveries of Software Products. It’s difficult for the developers to resolve such bugs and testers used to get a lot of objections for such bugs. Sometimes it may spoil the relationships between testers and developers. But how to handle Non-reproducible bugs is the concern of the time.

There are various terms to reduce the number of non-reproducible defects to a minimum.

How to deal with Non Reproducible Issues:

Software testers need to improve their skills in order to how to reproduce such issues.

Below we share our experience to handle these kinds of situations:

a) A software Tester should try to capture the story around the issue and not just steps.
b) We should try to capture the complete Test Environment.
c) Always capture the possible Test Execution Results that should contain the test data, screenshots of issues, the applications logs, Device logs, Server machine logs.
d) A tester needs to be more patient while working on such issues.
e) Maintain the test data and modify as per the client test inputs or adjust to reproduce the bug.
f) Always add the test steps that get the execution closer to the bug.
g) The observation skills on the application behaviour under the test should be sharp.
h) Discuss the issue with your teammates and development team and try to reproduce them on Debugging mode.
i) If a Software Tester has to perform exploratory testing then there should be aware of all the configurations as well as system set-ups.

After the above discussion, we conclude that we should try to reproduce them with available resources but one should not spend too much time on these issues that it will affect the deliverables of the product.

It is essential to have detailed and properly explained 'Steps to reproduce' in which the bug occurred to reproduce a bug.

If a bug has stopped Reappearing at the client-side, you can mark the bug as “unreproducible” in your defect tracking tool. Try to reproduce the issue to determine the occurrence of the defect and avoid reporting on the basis of a single time occurrence of the bug.

Always, keep in mind the severity and priority of non-reproducible issues and spend the time and resources according to the need.

A software Tester should be updated with new trends and forums about various types of issues and their occurrences. It will help in differentiating and Reproducing of system-specific, browser-specific, product-specific, external issues, etc.

BugRaptors is a QA and Software Testing Firm. We provide manual and automated performance testing services for software, web and mobile applications.

Vivek Rana

With rich experience of more than 10 years in the industry, Vivek Rana is a QA enthusiast working as a Team Lead at BugRaptors. Starting his journey as a system Analyst, Vivek over the years not only developed a strong grip on manual and automation testing services in different domains and different testing types but also ensures the release of quality of software products and system and manage software test teams. His fun-loving approach and whole-hearted dedication make him a perfect team player. He is a highly driven expert to improve the QA process and loves to travel to mountains escaping the city hustle and bustle whenever he longs for some leisure.