See how you can store and share bugs and the environment where they were produced.
During the course of this blog, I’m going to do a terrible thing: I’m going to assert that a meme has been wiped out. Nobody wants to see the death of a meme. But on the plus side, we will be able to rebuild some bridges that may or may not have been burnt between QA and Devs, and we may have a nice rosy picture to paint. The meme I am referring to is….. “Could not reproduce the bug, issue closed”
In the pantheon of QA memes, this Zeus-like figure can be argued to stand above all others. For those uninitiated, the meme refers to the situation where the enthusiastic QA finds a bug. They should, at this stage, diligently detail the environment in which the bug was found, take screenshots, and open an issue with whichever ticketing system the Development team uses. The Development team then has to reproduce the bug before they can fix it. If they can’t reproduce it, then the issue is closed, upsetting the QA, who genuinely believes they have found a bug. Now, this may occur for any number of reasons: the Developer might not have received enough information to reproduce the bug, so there can be right and wrong on both sides. But let’s never let nuance get in the way of a good meme. What would be cool is if the tester could send the environment and bug through to the developer with a handy URL. I think you know where this is going.
Virtuoso’s Live Authoring allows you to interact with a headless browser in real-time. Now, I know what you are thinking: this sounds like a recorder, and recorders are great until they are not. But Live Authoring works the other way around to a recorder; you write the test, and the test is validated by a Virtuoso bot. Live Authoring is amazing until, well, forever. This means when a test fails, you are pretty certain you have found a bug. Woohoo, the tester did what they love doing: breaking things.
Live Authoring is just incredible, and you can learn more about it here. But what is interesting to us when looking at our meme is the fact that each test step has its own sharable URL that includes the environment any bug may have been found in. Those paying attention might be a little ahead of me. Yep, that right here is a URL not just detailing, but giving you both the bug and the environment. That issue is not getting closed because the bug cannot be reproduced.
We can prove the bug exists. Fantastic, but how do we get into the environment where the bug is produced to start some serious debugging? Well, there is a toggle for that. It’s time to initiate Advanced Mode and unleash DevTools.
The headless browser that is the environment where the bug was found now has all the tools developers are familiar with from Google DevTool. You get element inspector, console and source viewer, network monitoring, etc., all in the place where you need it to do your debugging. No more context switching, no more moving around tabs. Just the tools you need in the environment you need them. QA and Dev is now a marriage made in heaven.
OK, so the death of a meme is a little hyperbolic, and my tongue was firmly in my cheek as I wrote it. But Live Authoring and its Advanced Mode do offer greater cross-functional work, increased speed to fixing bugs, and a powerful tool for delivering quality. None of this is not to say that the bug may be seen as an “undocumented feature”. But with Virtuoso’s requirements tracking, that should never happen. I think that’s a story for another blog post though.
Are you interested in learning more about Virtuoso's Live Authoring? Well have we got the video for you. Check it out for an overview of Virtuoso's latest feature:
