One day I had a chat with a Tech Support
engineer, and she told me she was suffering a customer issue because the debug
log was so ugly that she just cannot get meaningful information from it to
identify the root cause. “The object I need is printed in only hex format but
not human-readable string, hence to track an object are getting extremely
difficult.” She complained.
“I filed a bug, because it significantly
slows down the process of working out the final solution”
This conversation just shocks me a lot, in
that it opens a new view to look at the duty of Quality Assurance. Previously,
I think the work methods of software testing are just in two ways, one is
testing with testcases and another, testing from customer’s view. I have never
think of testing like a Tech Support.
One of the key characteristics of Tech
Support working style. is the attempting to track an issue down will never stop
until root cause is disclosed. Only by doing in this way, can Tech Support come
out a reasonable explanation to customers, and then in turn figure out the
final solution to the issue.
In testing activity, it’s a common case that
QA will observe something unexpected but cannot easily get a fixed way to
reproduce it. How to deal with this situation? It’s not safe to file a bug as
chances are Dev cannot reproduce it. Sometimes, QA just let it go for various reasons,
but which will never be reasonable for TS to do so, as Customers will not
accept any of them at all.
It’s necessary for Software testing engineer
to work in this way and master this kind of capability.
Firstly, some issues should be exposed in
customer side now can be revealed in advance in testing phases, that’s
absolutely good for any one.
Secondly, the product debugging mechanism
could get sharpen as QA becomes its big user and will report all the
inconveniences, so very likely in the above example the poor TS will enjoy
addressing the problem.
Last but not least, a QA with positive attitude
will see it’s also a chance to improve his competence in terms of problem
resolving.
