A bug is anything that would make a user think less of your product. It’s the simple. You can split hairs from there, but that’s the baseline. In this post, we’ll talk about what a bug is and how you should approach finding and reporting them.

Types of Bugs

If we define a bug as anything that detracts from your product, that doesn’t mean we can leave it at that. These bugs can be categorized in many ways, but the most logical to me, is to consider what type of defect it is and how exactly it fails a user. I’m always looking for ways to expand my empathy for the users I expect to use my product, and this type of categorization helps.

With that in mind, these are the ways I sort out bugs.

Functionality

Functionality bugs fail a user because we’re violating the stated goals of our product.

This is the baseline for bugs for an average tester. Any one who tests software should be ready to ask questions about requirements and be ready the moment a new feature is available to test with both standard and tricky use cases.

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Quality is something we talk about all the time. We want our work to be good, to make money, to help others, to be awesome and admired. The word quality comes up, especially while planning our work. In the end, we say we don’t test enough, we have to do hotfixes, the app breaks in ways we didn’t imagine.

The dictionary says that quality, in this context, is:

degree of excellence, superiority of kind

Obviously, a quality product goes way beyond just software. We apply similar standards to every item we use, every piece of art or music we consume, and even the people around us. Quality is something we all know when we see it but find it hard to explicitly define. As it relates to software directly, it:

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