Non-Biased Angle Towards Your Product: A BetterBugs Perspective

Nishil Patel

Nishil Patel

Nov 6, 2023

4 min read

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Non-Biased Angle Towards Your Product: A BetterBugs Perspective

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.

Table of Contents

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)

Introduction

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.

The Risk of Bias in Software Testing

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.

  • A belief that if a feature is working as expected, testing should only be done for the positive scenarios. The negative scenarios or the edge cases remain unaccounted for leading to confusion among the team members.
  • There may be an instance of an issue that could be unique or peculiar and a cause for a major failure. Without using measurable criteria or proper exploration, based on previous experiences, testers may spend too much time and resources trying to find bugs of similar severity that may not even re-occur.
  • If there is a pre-existing belief that a product is already developed with the highest standards and best practices, there may be a high chance that that product might not be tested in a comprehensive or rigorous way. This could lead to skewed results misleading the team on their testing efforts.
  • A poorly performing AI-based software is the result of the improper and skewed datasets that are being fed to it by humans. An AI-based model is as good as the datasets it utilizes to train and test upon. The results are likely to be inaccurate, even though the test data may have been considered unbiased. Actually, it's not.

Read More: The Future of Automated Debugging

How to Maintain Objectivity

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:

  • Include the overall process rather than just product features while showcasing it: Solutions that help easily do something that is complex to achieve. Yes, there are pitfalls. There are stages when the product faces issues. There may be a lot more issues now and in the future. But we made it and we are continually improving. This is what an unbiased angle looks like.
  • Create compelling stories about your product: Make people understand why has the product been created and what value it adds to your workflow. You want to convey the message to users that you understand their problems well and that your product is here to solve that very problem.
  • Yes, there are similar solutions available: So why should people choose to use your product instead? It’s because you truly understand the problems and have addressed them through your product in a way much better than any other product or company did.
  • Focus on important things: Getting fixated on a particular feature or a scenario can be frustrating. Some features may take more time and effort to implement. Being flexible and focusing on things that help you get the most out of your efforts for important functionalities can very well take your product to the finish line.
  • Use facts instead of claiming hypothetical results: Use well-researched and verifiable statistics that corroborate your claims. If a product says that it helps boost your productivity by shortening a process that took 80-100 minutes to just 20-30 minutes, now that’s a realistic data point that can most certainly be measured. This states that the product owners have done their homework well. Hence, the product.
  • Address the limitations: Instead of ignoring the shortcomings of your product, working on the suggested improvements or limitations is the only way to deliver a quality product. There is no other alternative to it.
  • Using a natural and humble tone to describe your product: Yes, your product is really good. It was required and serves the purpose well. But, the way it is supposed to be described to the potential users or the people who might be listening or reading about it should be in a natural tone rather than an exaggerated or emotional way.
  • Promote collaboration and create a feedback loop among team members: A product becomes a quality product with collaborative efforts. Yes, you are an expert. But, there are other experts too. You never know who will shine through a problem that you have been stuck upon for too long. That one suggestion or input can very well be the key to solving your problem.

Read More: The Hidden Costs of Poor Bug Reporting

BetterBugs' Approach to Unbiased Testing

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.

Summing Up

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!

Speed Up Your QA Workflows

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

There are many ways to achieve a non-biased view regarding your product. Some of them are using KPIs to measure the results, testing your product well, getting feedback from all possible sources, and being honest and responsible while making claims about a product.

Written by

Nishil Patel | CEO & Founder

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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.

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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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