Summary

This chapter started out with an excerpt from the kids' story about Chicken Little that described her reaction when an acorn unexpectedly fell on her head. She thought she had discovered a serious problema Severity 1, Priority 1 bugand immediately began running around screaming that the sky was falling.

As a software tester, it's sometimes easy to get caught up in the moment when you find that something in the program you're testing doesn't work as expected. What you've learned in this chapter is that there's a formal process that should be followed to properly isolate, categorize, record, and track the problems you find to ensure that they're eventually resolved and, hopefully, fixed.

Chicken Little has never read Chapter 19, so she didn't know what to do other than tell everyone she met what she thought was happening. She was wrong, of course. The sky wasn't falling. If she had at least stopped to isolate and reproduce the problem, she would have discovered that it wasn't really a problem at allit was by design that the nut fell from the tree. In the end, her panic and naïveté did her in. (If you're unfamiliar with the story, she and her barnyard friends eventually meet a hungry fox who invites them into his den to hear their story).

The moral of all this is that to be an effective tester, you need to not just plan your testing and find bugs, but also to apply a methodical and systematic approach to reporting them. An exaggerated, poorly reported, or misplaced bug is no bug at alland surely one that won't be fixed.