Bug (n): A malfunction that tends to annoy users and stress out IT managers. It can be prevented by following Mr Suricate advice.
Do you know what the number one enemy is for companies with a website or mobile app? Bugs!
No, don't make fun of it. It may seem trivial to you, but you definitely shouldn't underestimate it. Your customers, for their part, certainly don't underestimate it.
After all, 86% of French people abandon a purchase because of a glitch, and more than 70% of them go to another website to find the product.
In short, a simple bug can have a negative impact on your business, both financially and in terms of your reputation, as it causes you to lose credibility.
So how can we avoid bugs? No need to get too worked up— there’s no such thing as a bug-free system.
There will always be someone who manages to slip through the cracks, simply because software is developed by humans, who are not infallible and can therefore make mistakes.
However, it is possible to limit the number of these bugs and minimize their impact. Follow our tips to ensure a smooth, frictionless customer experience.
Focus on the quality of your application
If you want to minimize bugs as much as possible, you must first and foremost make quality the core focus of your application—that is, ensure that every member of the team is committed to improving the product’s quality, not just the tester.
Quality is everyone's responsibility—from developers to quality engineers, including the Product Owner and the UX Designer.
This requires raising awareness among technical teams about clean code and best development practices, as well as implementing practices that combine coding and testing, such as TDD (Test-Driven Development), or even integrating business logic with BDD (Behavior-Driven Development).
It’s also important to document your code with tests that have been automated from the start. Above all, it’s important to ensure consistency across the board by sharing tools and methods.
Finally, it is important to invest in a testing strategy tailored to your specific context—one that takes all aspects into account, whether functional or not—and that allows you to implement the right types of tests in the right places, from the code to the user interface, as well as to establish the right metrics for monitoring, not to mention maintenance.
This makes it possible to identify bugs that need to be fixed at the right time—that is, before the system goes live.
For more information on quality, we invite you to read the article by our expert on the subject, Michael Granier, which serves as a brief introduction to the world of testing and quality.
Minimize the impact of bugs by implementing automated tests
Once you've incorporated quality into your process and established your testing strategy, another way to minimize the impact of bugs is to perform automated tests. These are much faster than manual tests.
Some checks can take several hours when performed manually, whereas an automated system can complete them in just a few minutes when multiple tasks are run simultaneously.
This allows you to run more tests more frequently, which means you can identify bugs faster and fix them more quickly—before your users even notice them or have time to complain.
And you know what they say: the world belongs to those who catch bugs early.
What’s more, manual testing— which is performed by humans—can miss bugs due to a lack of concentration or inattention, whereas automated testing—carried out by robots—is generally more reliable, making the reporting of defects more effective.
Please note: this does not mean that test automation is the answer to everything, as it has its limitations: automation only verifies the test cases that have been defined for it and is therefore effective and accurate for those specific cases, but it will not go beyond them.
That is why it is also important to combine both manual and automated testing—and, in particular, to conduct exploratory testing—because if you rely solely on automated testing, you run the risk of missing bugs in scenarios that were not anticipated beforehand.
In other words, run as many tests as possible—both manual and automated—as early as possible and everywhere.
Bugs, catch 'em all!
