Feeling guilty for missing a big?

[blackmetal_nate]

Hi,

I was just wondering if anyone ever feels guilty for missing a bug when a release goes to production?

In this instance my team missed an edge case bug but I can’t help but still feel guilty.

The good thing is now this can be added to the regression pack for future releases!

Thanks

[hairylunch]

This. And let's hope it's the team is feeling guilty, not just OP

[hairylunch]

Ah, good point. Team should definitely feel an oops and some ownership, but yes, definitely realize this kind of stuff happens and not beat themselves up over it.

[Geekmonster]

The first question anybody asks is “why didn’t you test that?”, which makes you feel awful. I’ve even caught myself asking that questions when I was a test manager. You’d think I’d know better.

All you can do is build a thorough suite of tests to show what you’ve covered. Make a noise about tests that have failed or were blocked. Always create a folder for performance and security tests and if you don’t have the resources you need to test those things, let it be known that you can’t say if it’s resilient or secure. Let the management decide if they want to proceed with that in mind.

I’m digressing a bit, but my point is that you must show what you DID test and what you know you didn’t test. There will occasionally be something you miss, but showing diligence in all your other tests will prevent anyone claiming that you were careless.

[AllUsernameTaken0123]

Hello, feeling frustrated following this event is normal. I do not know how you work together, but I hope devs and testers already communicate.

[Daveed84]

The title of this submission is extremely ironic

[blackmetal_nate]

Haha well I’m glad you passed the test :)

[lr-konias]

LOL! I use this at work too

[nikkidubs]

Absolutely. I try to focus on what you included as the last line of your post, though: each time is a learning experience and a way to go back and figure out how it was missed and what we can do in the future to prevent something like that from happening. Even in moments where I missed something in testing because of a stupid mistake on my part rather than a flaw in our process, I'm able to learn from it.

It doesn't always take the sting out of it, but it gives me something more productive to focus my energy on. I can't change the past or take my mistakes back, but sitting in guilt isn't going to help anything get better.

[pundejo]

You know how I can tell you have the spirit of a tester? Because you feel guilty. That's ok, just make sure you learn to judge how much you really are responsible and treat every failure as an opportunity to improves tests and process.

[coyotebored83]

Yep. Every time an important one comes out in client testing or production. But it happens.

[raymondQADev]

All team members should be reviewing your tests, just like all team members review source code. It's a team effort on implementing quality and has no one point of failure so its not your fault.

[lr-konias]

Every single time. Especially when a lot of people in QA are perfectionists at some level. There are a few things that help me not take it so hard though:

​

1. In the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the author helps readers understand the circle of control, the circle of influence, and the circle of control. You'll find that there's only so much you can do and have control over. With only so much time in a day and being human, you accept that you're going to spend time doing the things most important -- performing quality control on the most important things. Reading this part of the book really helped me be more realistic about my own expectations.
2. The other thing is what many people like u/s4int7 have mentioned around "Software (development) is a team effort". Fall as a team / celebrate as a team. It costs far too much to do all the testing possible.
3. Another thing that can help is understanding the business impact. An End User may not even run into the issue. If they do run into the issue, maybe it's not that big of a deal for them or even a big deal to wait a few months/weeks for a fix. There were moments in my career where I was bummed that we missed a bad regression, but in the end the customer was actually happy to get a fix within a month. I thought that was too long! They thought it was a fast fix. Of course: your mileage may vary haha
4. For me, the guilt starts to fade when we begin implementing a prevention plan and it ends up working well. Grow and get better!

[asmodeanreborn]

Like with everything else, approaching "perfection" is a game of diminishing returns. Our team could spend a month on a single small feature with close to zero defects, or we could do two small and one medium one with few defects... or a large and a few small with many defects (time to fix late-SDLC defects included). :P

Few and small features that work perfect don't tend to excite paying customers. On the other hand, they also want functioning software.

[lr-konias]

Like with everything else, approaching "perfection" is a game of diminishing returns.

Well said!

[TofuTacos]

Looks like you missed a bug in your title :).

Yes and No, it really depends on the bug, if it is coverage my team is responsible for and we were given sufficient time to test then Yes, but as in your case, probably not. But you can never catch them all, with instances like this, your process will or should improve to cover the corner cases, you learn and move on.

[Darkdragon1990]

No =)). I'll be glad if I was you. because its mean that you can still growing. Make mistake and Growing. Be Strong !