What is Bug Life Cycle in Software Testing? Best Tools For Bug Management

A defect/bug life cycle is the continuous sequence of steps that a bug goes through from its identification to its resolution in software development. This life cycle standardizes the bug management process, ensuring teams can manage and resolve them more effectively.

Early bug detection allows the developers to address issues as early as possible, not letting them get entrenched into the code and become harder to fix.

• Allows both teams to approach the testing project (and especially bug management) in an unstructured manner
• Reduces the chance of overlooking critical issues
• Improves communication between team members and stakeholders
• Ensures that software quality is continuously monitored and enhanced
• Establishes a standard for the bug management process

Read More: What is Test Case Management? A Complete Guide

What is a Software Bug/Defect?

Bugs and defects are often used interchangeably since they all refer to problems in software. However, there are several slight nuances that distinguish them:

Read More: How To Find Bugs on Websites

Stages of a Bug Life Cycle

There are two ways to describe the defect life cycle:

• By bug workflow
• By bug status

1. Bug Life Cycle Workflow

The flow chart below gives you some idea of the process that unfolds when a bug is identified. It is based on personal experience with various testing teams, so it’s not representative of every bug process, but it is still a typical cycle for a bug in software testing.

The table below provides a more detailed breakdown of the activities at each stage and the staff members who are likely to be involved. There are three distinct groups: testers, developers, and project managers or leads.

We can also look at the bug life cycle from the status of bugs. Each bug status corresponds to a specific activity in the bug life cycle:

1. New/Open
2. Deferred/Postponed
3. Assigned
4. In Progress
5. Fixed
6. Pending Retest
7. Verified/Closed
8. Reopened
   
   

Best Practices To Optimize Your Bug Life Cycle

QA teams should strive to optimize and improve the bug resolution efficiency.

Based on observations and analytics generated from test runs, teams can make organization-specific tweaks to this workflow. Below are several recommendations to make your bug life cycle better:

• Establish clear bug taxonomies to better categorize newly found bugs. It is essentially a shared language between the testers and developers, allowing them to describe the bug in a structured manner. Here are several bug criteria to get started with:

  • Severity (High - Medium - Low)
  • Urgency (High - Medium - Low)
  • Reproducibility (Reproducible, Intermittent, Non-Reproducible, or Cannot Reproduce)
  • Root Cause (Coding Error, Design Flaw, Configuration Issue, or User Error, etc.)
  • Bug Type (Functional Bugs, Performance Issues, Usability Problems, Security Vulnerabilities, Compatibility Errors, etc.)
  • Areas of Impact
  • Frequency of Occurrence

• Establish clear bug reporting guidelines (context, bug categories as listed above, step-by-step guide to reproduce bugs, environment details, screenshots (if needed), expected results versus current results, etc.).

• Adopt bug tracking tools to automate certain stages of the bug life cycle (bug logging, assignment, etc.)

• Perform root cause analysis to prevent similar issues from happening in the future. The root cause analysis involves the following steps:

  • Gather data from previous test runs, system logs, user feedback, and available documentation to prove that there is a bigger issue to be tackled.

  • Brainstorm and identify potential root causes for the bug (use popular techniques like the 5 Whys, Fishbone Diagrams, or Fault Trees).

  • Determine the likelihood and impact of each root cause.

• Adopt continuous testing and ensure that the bug life cycle fits seamlessly into this process by leveraging CI/CD tools.

How To Use Katalon To Streamline Root Cause Analysis and Debugging Efforts

Katalon is a modern and comprehensive software quality management platform that leverages AI to streamline the root cause analysis process.

Katalon's AI capabilities can review test failure and perform in-depth root cause analysis. To conduct further test analysis, you can click on the Test Result ID, which is 102282108 in the example below.

Katalon provides you with valuable information to easily identify the root cause, including:

• Error Message – specific reason why the execution failed
• Attachments – captured screenshots and even recorded videos to help you visualize the issue
• Specific Assertion – if you have configured Katalon to mark failed steps, it will also show those steps to help you debug faster 
• Full Error Logs – fully downloadable error log
• Execution Log – detailed log for each test step and step status, allowing you to quickly troubleshoot the steps that cause test failures

As you can see in the image below, the Error Message was Web Element with id: ‘Object Repository/Page_OrangeHRM/input_LOGIN Panel_txtUsername’ located by ‘//input[@id=’txtUsername’] not found. It means that either the Username was not present on the page or the XPath expression to locate it was incorrect.

You can see in the screenshot that Katalon automatically captured and attached the Test Result analysis, as well as the full Error Log and Execution Log. Katalon makes your root cause analysis even simpler by:

• Grouping all failed test results with similar features in one centralized place so you can quickly compare and pinpoint the root cause.
• Suggesting Failure Reason to the top-level exception of failed test result with the option to modify the assigned reason.

You can also leverage Katalon’s debugging utilities to speed up the debugging process. In most automation tools, if a test case fails and you make changes to the script, you often need to execute the entire script again to ensure the desired test outcome — which is time-consuming. With Katalon, you have several innovative options to debug faster, including:

• Debug > Run from here – to execute the script from the particular step that failed
• Debug > Enable/Disable steps – to skip unwanted steps during the execution

Katalon also equips you with a set of options for more convenient debugging purposes, including Resume debugging, Suspend debugging, Terminate debugging, Disconnect, Step into the current code block, Step over the current code block, Return from the current code block, and Run to a specific line.

More than just a debugging tool, Katalon also enables QA teams to quickly create test scripts without any code, manage test cases and test artifacts in 1 single centralized repository, execute tests across multiple environments, and generate detailed smart test reports. Teams of any scale can leverage Katalon to level-up all stages of their testing life cycle.

Start Your Katalon Free Trial

FAQs on Bug Life Cycle

1. What is a bug life cycle in software testing?

The bug life cycle represents the process a bug goes through from its identification to its resolution and closure. The typical stages include New, Assigned, Open, Fixed, Retested, and Closed. Additional statuses like Deferred or Rejected may also be used depending on the workflow.

2. What is deferred in the bug life cycle?

A deferred bug is one that is acknowledged but postponed for later resolution. This usually happens when the bug has low priority, is not critical to current milestones, or is scheduled for a future release.

3. What is the difference between deferred and rejected bugs?

A deferred bug is postponed for later resolution due to low priority or other reasons.

A rejected bug is not considered a bug at all, usually because it’s not reproducible, is expected behavior, or is a duplicate of an existing bug.

4. What is bug cycle in Jira?

In Jira, the bug life cycle follows customizable workflows. A typical cycle includes stages like To Do (New), In Progress (Assigned/Open), Resolved (Fixed), In Testing (Retesting), and Done (Closed). Additional statuses like Deferred or Rejected can also be configured.

Tri