No software comes free of bugs, and finding and solving them is a constant part of the everyday life of every software developer team. Here at Pluribus One our "bug journey" starts with bug finding, it continues with bug tracking and it ends with bug solving.
Bug Finding
Our software developers leverage automated testing to find and discover new bugs and also love to go bug hunting to manually find those nasty pesky critters that hide among code lines. Sometimes a bug escapes our developers and stays hidden until a customer just like you find it. In the sad event that you may notice something strange in the software, from a unexpected screen to a sudden slowness don't hesitate to contact us! Please, start by checking our FAQs and Troubleshoot section within the Knowledge Base to find a possible solution. If you can't find a solution for your problem don't hesitate to ask directly for our help by using the ticket section .
Bug Tracking
At Pluribus One we keep track of bugs, both solved and unsolved ones. As curious and devoted entomologists we keep an archive of bugs and we classify them according to three parameters: type, severity, priority. Knowing how we classify our bugs can help you understand how we are going to help you having the best possible software! The following sections will explain you the three parameters we use to classify bugs.
Bug Types
Each bug affects the software in a peculiar way, these are the types of bugs we use during our classification:
- Functional - A functional bug interrupts the normal workflow and/or implies an unexpected behavior from the software. An example can be an unexpected page in the User Interface, or some weird value shown in a table.
- Visual - This bug is quite easy to notice and it impacts the purely visual aspects of the User Interface. Are you facing missing elements such as misplaced columns? That's a clear sign of a visual bug!
- Content - This bug is associated to typos in text, in the grammar or the translation. Something like finding a bugz instead of bugs... silly right? Definitely! but still worth being solved.
- Performance - Is your software slow? Are the loading times super, I mean really extremely long? This is definitely a performance bug.
- Crash - A sadly but hopefully extremely rare occurrence... any sudden and unexpected interruption of the software belongs to this type.
Bug Severity
Each bug is a source of problems but not all of them cause the same amount of trouble. Bug Severity is a measure of "how much trouble" a bug is causing. These are levels of severity from the smaller to the biggest ones:
- Low - A bug of this severity is a nuisance at best, just a minor inconvenience that can annoy the user but doesn't prevent the normal use of the software.
- Medium - Bugs of this kind can be extremely annoying but they don't prevent the use of major software functionalities. Most of the time users can avoid this bugs with some sort of "workaround".
- High - This type of bugs can severely impact the user by totally preventing the use of some core functionalities of the software or by making the user experience really worse than user. Bugs of this kind are definitely worth being solved soon.
- Critical - This is the type of bug no one wants to meet. EVER. Critical Bugs are high impact and may have some nasty effect such as causing data loss or reducing the security of the software. Critical Bugs are rare but are taken care as soon as possible. Critical Bugs are serious and may want you scream "exterminate!" as soon as you spot one of them but worry not because removing them is always considered a top priority by our developers.
- Blocker - These bugs are the top level trouble makers in the family of bugs. Blocker Bugs totally prevent software from running, they are extremely rare and usually manifest themselves the first time the software is started, during installation or after a reboot of the system. These bugs are, together with the critical ones, considered as very important and our team works to solve them as soon as possible.
Bug Priority
Each bug deserves to be fixed, and, from a certain perspective you may even say that each of them is an "attention seeker" of sort. Here at Pluribus One, as you can easily guess, we would love to magically solve all bugs in a moment but we have to prioritize. We use four levels of priority, from the smaller to the biggest: low, medium, high, immediate.
- Low - A bug of this kind is not going to be fixed soon because it rarely occurs and/or has a low impact on users. As sad as it can be, these bugs will have to wait while software developers take cares of other more dangerous bugs first.
- Medium - These bugs are going to be solved soon, and the developers are already planning their demise. This is the most common priority for bugs and is usually associated with bug fixes delivered with with ordinary software releases.
- High - This priority is associated to bugs that are causing serious troubles to customers or that may be causing them soon. Software developers take care of these bugs as soon as possible. Here at Pluribus One we take great care to remove High Priority bugs as soon as possible. High Priority bugs are fixed with normal software releases and with patches.
- Immediate - The highest possible priority for bugs. Software developers use all their effort to remove and solve this type of bugs as fast as they can. This type of bug is usually fixed with patches.
Bug Solving
Here at Pluribus One we divide our software developer's energies in improving the software, adding new functionalities and fixing bugs. On a daily base our developers dedicate time to remove bugs and improve the software quality. Every time a new version of the software is ready to be delivered we make it available for you. Please read our software Release Notes to discover what are the improvements and what bugs have been crashed fixed! Please don't forget that the nastiest and more troublesome bugs are fixed with security patches while less important bugs are fixed in standard software releases.