Bug Bash – Having other people test your Software

Bug Bash is a unique test activity in Software QA, rarely used by testing teams. Not many people are aware as to what is a bug bash, and why it is used.

From Wikipedia, a Bug Bash is a procedure where all the developers, testers, program managers, usability researchers, designers, documentation folks, and even sometimes marketing people, put aside their regular day-to-day duties and “pound on the product”- that is, each exercises the product in every way they can think of.

The way we do Bug Bash in our company is – teams are given a day to play with any feature in our product (mostly all new features being released). People will start off the day with plenty of enthusiasm and excitement and provide feedback at the end of the day to the team.

Benefits of Bug bash include:

• Team who have built/tested a feature would always like someone else to have a look at it prior release, it will get them honest, unbiased feedback which is very valuable before the release, it also saves lot of time and money for the project teams.

• Each person’s perspective is different from other. They think differently and so test differently. Despite QA owner’s best efforts in reviewing feature functional spec, deciding and writing test cases, a new person can come in and find a bug by trying something that you never even considered—hitting a different key, clicking the mouse faster, starting a function in a different way, and so on.

• Watching how someone else approaches a problem is a great way to learn new testing techniques. There are always new and different approaches to testing that you can know.

• Users performing this activity will also build knowledge about the features being built in the organization.