What is meant by an "INTERMITTENT BUG"? How to deal with the intermittent bug?

Hello Members!
I have explained to some extent the first question. Would you participate and reply
on both the questions.

The intermittent bug is a invisible bug. This nightmare is hard to observe, yet often enough that it can't be ignored. You can't debug because you can't find it.

You will start to doubt it after a long time. It obeys the same laws of logic as else. What makes it difficult is that it occurs only under unknown conditions. Try to record the circumstances under which the bug does occur, so that you can guess what the variability it has.

_______ JAY _______

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Permalink Reply by Kapil Samadhiya on September 19, 2008 at 12:44am

Hi Jay,

Intermittent Bugs are the type of bugs which are not having consistent behavior. Means if you execute same test 2 times on any application, each time it will give you some different result. May be you get it again on executing 3rd time.

Because of the Intermittent behavior of bug, it never be easy to reproduce.

What we can do only is : Write the exact steps of testing with the Test Data entered, then note the final result of 1st testing, if possible, attache the screen shot. Do the same 2nd time and write the result of 2nd time, also screen shot. So like this we can get some results with us and based on that we can reproduce the bug.

Please feel free to ask any doubts regarding Software Testing & ISTQB.

GOOD LUCK !

Kapil Samadhiya

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Permalink Reply by Sridevi on September 19, 2008 at 12:23pm

Kapil, nice explanation. thanks

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Permalink Reply by Anonymous Test Engineer on December 14, 2011 at 1:59pm

will you plese tell me if any issue occur only one time ... and issue is not reproduce on secound time ... means a sudden unexpected behaviour ... but not generate nextime is known by which name ... i need a excat word for that ...

Like intermitant ( type of bugs which are not having consistent behavior), but in intermitant it may be reproducible on third time as you say ...

waiting for your repaly

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Permalink Reply by Rajesh on December 15, 2011 at 9:37am

@ Kapil - can u send me the reference material for ISTQB foundation level exam to my email id - rsrajez@gmail.com

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Permalink Reply by JAY on September 19, 2008 at 5:19am

Hi Kapil!
Thanks for your brief and nice reply.

I expect you to better display your knowledge on ISTQB step by step rather than awaiting questions from members.
I hope you will agree on my point.
Regards.
________ JAY ________.

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Permalink Reply by Kiran Kumar on September 19, 2008 at 10:10am

Intermittent Bug is a bug which is not able to reproduce in all the cases, it will occurred only in some special cases.

For example you can take an account module, in that we have a monthly report, in this page we have a dropdown as below

Date Range Dropdown : Value this week ( First day of current week to Current date)
(Ex: 18-Aug-2008 to 23-Aug-2008)

: Last month ( First day of last month to Last day of last month)

Issue : If any person invoke this page then the current week should be shown as given ( first day of current week to curret day of current week), this is fine in our testing. But when client checks the same it was wrong. A very good reason hide behind this case, we are all worked from monday to friday/sat day and given the delivery on satday/friday, then the client start checking on Satday/sunday. The issue is reproducable only on sundays, it's fine from Monday to satday as we never tested on sundays. So this type of issues can be treated as intermittent bug.

Guys am i correct, please tell me your opinion

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Permalink Reply by Kapil Samadhiya on September 19, 2008 at 10:52am

Hi Jay,

Thanks.

Yes, I would like to share many things about ISTQB, but yaar that is very wast & frankly speaking, It will take too much time if I am going to share something from my own. Right now at least I am having that much time of replying on people's queries.

I will surely do that as I will get the time.

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Permalink Reply by Siddiq on November 7, 2008 at 10:56am

Hi,

Adding to Jay,

Intermittent Issue is which can't be re-produced on our will, it just creeps in under varied circumstances.

Dealing with these issues is not so easy, I would deal in this way,

0) Test against Business requirements unlike test requirements.
1) Health check(Sanity Check) the module or functionality related
2) Check Closely the dependencies or Business rules with in and associated.
3) Perform regression testing more than twice with different regression strategies.
4) Check under different environments especially production environment.
5) Will be lucky to identify a "Latent Issue"

Live Example which happened : http://beta.cricket.yahoo.com/cricket/livematch?mid=11890

This morning I was checking Cricket Score, yesterday I didn't logout from Yahoo server.

On_load of the above page the whole UI was disturbed and page just well messed up to see the score!

I logged out and checked the score, is fine, again tried to login and check - working fine.

The above page On_Load with session timed out(I was logged out after the session was expired @ Yahoo Server) but my cookies where having the same old info, thus On_Load of the page the issue re-surfaced("INTERMITTENT fault")

I have reported to Yahoo :) lets see how things will change...it's beta

This issue is an amazing co - incidence!
Thanks,
Siddiq