Nishil Patel
Nov 6, 2023
4 min read
Ignoring the drawbacks and limitations of a software product during development can become a huge concern if the issues are not addressed properly in the early stages. Once the product is live, it becomes even more problematic.
1.
The Risk of Bias in Software Testing
2.
How to Maintain Objectivity
3.
BetterBugs' Approach to Unbiased Testing
4.
Summing Up
5.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Ignoring the drawbacks and limitations of a software product during development can become a huge concern if the issues are not addressed properly in the early stages. Once the product is live, it becomes even more problematic.
As a product owner, one must be honest about the created product. It’s equally important to be transparent about the things that a product can or cannot do. Making unrealistic claims and turning a deaf ear towards the shortcomings can prove to be a huge roadblock for a product that could have real potential to be a huge success.
Silicon Valley has a famous line floating around for quite some time now. It’s called “Fake it, till you make it”.
It has actually worked previously for many startups.
Well, it still does help for the most part, but it comes with a serious contingency.
If everything goes fine, it's a win-win for everybody, especially for the product owners. But the moment something goes wrong, everything just falls like a house of cards.
This happens more often than we usually think.
Rather than taking a biased angle towards your product and making decisions driven by emotions or personal views, a balanced and strategic approach can undoubtedly take a product much further in the game and most definitely can help it win the race.
There could be many factors that could affect the decision-making process while testing software.
Biasing is one of the most overlooked factors that could potentially contribute to skewed or inaccurate results while developing and testing software.
It’s a human phenomenon. Biasing can be avoided mostly through one’s expertise, experience, and making use of automated tools.
Since we are on the subject of understanding the risks of biases associated with software testing, below are some ways to exemplify the same.
Read More: The Future of Automated Debugging
No product is flawless. That’s the ground truth. If your product is perfect on the first launch, then maybe you’re too late releasing it.
Waiting till the end until the product is flawless is not how it works while developing software products or any service.
It’s more like an iterative approach and continuous improvement way. That’s why we have agile development workflows now. If you say that your product is flawless, people are going to be gunning to find bugs in it and they most certainly will.
Read More: Agile Testing Best Practices
You still want your product to work like you envisioned it to be and promote it to the software community that it’s targeted.
So, how can you strike a balance between being unbiased and being engaging while still maintaining objectivity?
Below are some of the ways that shed light on the subject:
Read More: The Hidden Costs of Poor Bug Reporting
BetterBugs aims to solve real-world problems faced by testers on a daily basis. It helps improve productivity while software testing by creating an automated layer of abstraction to the existing workflow while reporting bugs.
It addresses the time constraints of a project and helps fill information gaps in clever ways to help testers make informed decisions in an efficient manner which could prove to be a key to reducing the introduction of unintentional biases during software testing.
BetterBugs’ development team truly understands that quality is to be promoted as a culture. It aims to provide a solution that improves the productivity of software testers while they report bugs to developers. The team equally values the way in which BetterBugs should be presented to the software testing community.
A product is indeed the owner’s precise vision but the scope of betterment is always there. Only then we can keep growing in what we do. This is only possible if we look at our product from an unbiased angle.
Happy Hunting!
Nishil is a successful serial entrepreneur. He has more than a decade of experience in the software industry. He advocates for a culture of excellence in every software product.
Meet the Author: Nishil Patel, CEO, and Co-founder of BetterBugs. With a passion for innovation and a mission to improve software quality.
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