Types of Software Bugs

Types of Software Bugs
By Nataliia Vasylyna

Every software product contains some errors. A software bug is such a system behavior that does not meet the requirements and produces the incorrect results. It is impossible to develop a bug-free system.

The failures of software products can be of various types. Here are some of them.

• Functional bugs – the improper system behavior or enabled product features.
• Communication issues – the process of user’s communication with the product may be impossible because of this type of errors, for example, the guide is unavailable or the notifications are not shown.
• Missing commands – some expected commands are omitted in the system.
• Syntactic bugs – the grammar mistakes or misspelled words and sentences used in product GUI. Such errors can be connected with the localization procedure.
• Improper handling of the errors – if something goes wrong, the user should get the proper and clear notification. Its text should be short and it should contain all necessary information about the nature of the error and the ways of its possible removal.
• Calculation bugs – improper logic for calculation. The bright example of such an error is the lost Mars Climate Orbiter. Such situation happened because there were used English units in the metric system.
• Control flow bugs – the violation of the sequence of actions.

The above-mentioned errors can be detected during different types of software testing, for example, functional, system, integration checking, etc. Besides that, there are several unusual bugs that may cause some difficulties during their discovering and fixing.

What Are the Unusual Software Bugs?

• Heisenbug – the errors of such a type can modify their properties. It is rather difficult to detect these issues as they will never be discovered in the debug-mode version of the product.
• Bohrbug appears under set of unique conditions. Sometimes it is called ‘ghost’.
• Mandelbug – the failure of chaotic nature. It is very difficult to define the actual reasons of this bug. It has very complex causes.
• Schroedinbug appears because of unusual using of the product.
• Phase of the Moon bug – rather rare error but it causes many troubles. It can appear because the system is vulnerable to some failures at the specific period of time and under particular conditions.
• Statistical bug – the issue typical for aggregates. It violates the random producing of the particular output.

These bugs are rather severe and the development team should work hard in order to remove the issues. And testers should also apply different techniques and methodologies to detect the majority of serious bugs. For example, they use white box testing technique to better understand the system logic.

To perform mobile, desktop or web site testing efficiently these methods should be adjusted for each company and each project. QATestLab is independent, offshore software testing company located in Kiev, Ukraine. QATestLab performs testing of products on each stage of software development cycle.

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