5 Tips to Thwart Testers

If you’re a web developer who does not enjoy seeing bugs assigned to you, you’re in luck – I’m about to reveal 5 easy tips to prevent bugs. Try these tricks on your own code before you check in your change, and you may find less bugs in your inbox the next morning.

1. Run the code and verify visually that it does what it’s meant to do. Very important.
2. Try it out in IE (or another different browser). These are my favourite browsers for testing, in order: Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox. Why is that? Because that’s usually the reverse order of favourite browsers for programmers. Any UI-level change is almost guaranteed to have issues in another browser.
3. Update to the latest version and compile before testing on your machine. Other people’s changes could affect yours.
4. Try it out in the development environment. A change of environment could affect the way your feature behaves.
5. Try the change in an end-to-end scenario. So for instance, you’ve changed one page of a user signup process. The first thing I’ll do is check that page. The second thing I’ll do is sign up the user and login. The way one element is displayed is often dependant on previous steps, and often affects subsequent steps.

And, bonus tip:

1. Go one step beyond the obvious. The third thing I’ll do is think – is there another way to do this same operation? For example, if changing a file saving operation, as well as testing that the drop down menu command works, try the keyboard shortcut as well.

Follow these steps, and I can assure you those pesky testers will be easing up on the “create new bug” button in no time.