Overheard during a test where a software programming change was being tested – and this exchange was broadcast to a large audience.

A little background here… Technical-types like it when specific terms are used to describe a situation. Business-types generally don’t care about the term itself as long as someone knows 1) there’s a problem and 2) it’s getting taken care of.

But for tekkies, terminology is as important as the general assessment, because it gives us a clue and direction where to start looking for solutions.

In this case, we see the use of the term “Bug” which means, “there’s a problem with the software and someone didn’t test properly before handing it over”. For dev-types, “Bug” is a big nasty word. However as noted in the exchange, the issue wasn’t a “bug” but an error with the data.

It’s like saying, “Microsoft Word is broken. It printed out my resume with the wrong start and end dates for my last job!” when the person typed the wrong start and end dates in there to begin with…

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Business tester: We have identified and corrected a bug that caused the problem

Dev-type: Bug?

Dev-type again: Umm, what exactly is the bug?

Business tester: The data we sent to you to load into the system had incorrect values.

Dev-type: This isn’t a bug, it’s a problem with the data. If you re-send correct data to load into the system we’ll re-load it

Business tester: Well, whatever term you’d like to use, some data has been wrongly loaded into the system and that’s what matters