ReadWriteWeb

Whether you're a tester reporting bugs or a developer who's trying to clarify a bug report, isolating bugs can be something of an art.

Some bugs are really obvious, such as if you go to a site and every page is down with a server error. Other bugs are much harder to report, as they only occur in certain circumstances. Here are some tips for isolating bugs and getting them fixed.

Exploratory testing is a form of quality checking that does not rely on test scripts. A tester is let loose on the system, often with very little introduction, and they are encouraged to report any and all issues they find.

As you're doing exploratory testing, you attempt to use the system as a user who doesn't understand where they need to go or where they will end up.This increases the likelihood of encountering issues that a formal test script might not bring to light.

What exploratory testing techniques can you use to uncover issues?

This weekend, venture capitalist and avid blogger Fred Wilson pointed out an interesting blog post written by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. In the article, Atwood explains how his company takes advice from Charles de Mar - a character in the 1985 movie Better Off Dead - who rather bluntly tells a first time skier to "go that way, really fast." Atwood says his company has focused mainly on speed, and believes speed of iteration is more valuable than quality.

If you're even peripherally involved in the social news space you are probably familiar with the rather rocky relationship that Digg has with its core community. Fueled partly by a need to counter false accusations from disgruntled community members who claim that Digg is rigged (i.e. that a core group of users decide what content is promoted), partly by the desire to encourage non-core members to participate more passionately, and partly by a need to affect a level of diversity and equality that would appear promising to potential acquirers, Digg has changed its algorithm again and again to artificially favor certain categories over others (i.e. world news and politics over technology) and to favor relatively new users over long-time, active users.