HOW TO AVOID BUGS ON YOUR WEBSITE OR MOBILE APPLICATION?

Bug (n): Non-compliant operation that has the gift of annoying users and stressing digital managers. Can be prevented by following the advice of Mr Suricate.  

Do you know the public enemy number one for companies that have a website or a mobile application? The bug!

No, don't scoff. It may not seem like much to you, but don't underestimate it. Your customers do not underestimate it. 

After all, 86% of French people give up on a purchase because of a bug and more than 70% of them go to another site to get the product .

In short, a simple bug can have a negative impact on your business, both financially and in terms of image because it makes you lose credibility. 

But then, how to avoid bugs? There is no need to get carried away, there is no such thing as zero bugs. 

There will always be one to slip through, simply because software is developed by humans and humans are not infallible and can make mistakes. 

However, it is possible to limit the amount of these bugs and minimize their impact. Follow our tips and you will ensure smooth and frictionless customer journeys. 

Focus on the quality of your application

If you want to reduce bugs as much as possible, you must first put quality at the heart of your application, i.e. make sure that each person in the team is involved in improving the quality of the product, and not just the tester. 

Quality is everyone's business, from the developers to the Quality Engineer, including the Product Owner and the UX Designer.

This requires technical teams to be aware of clean code and good development, but also to implement practices that combine code and testing, such as TDD (Test Driven Development), or even the business with BDD (Behavior Driven Development). 

You must also think about documenting your code with tests that have been automated from the start. And above all, it is important to ensure cross-functional consistency by sharing tools and methods. 

Finally, it is advisable to invest in a test strategy adapted to your context, which will take into account all its aspects, functional or not, and which will make it possible to implement the right types of tests in the right place, from the code to the interface, but also to set up the right monitoring indicators, without forgetting maintenance. 

This makes it possible to detect bugs that need to be corrected at the right time, i.e., before they go into production.

For more information on quality, we invite you to read the article by our expert on the subject, Michael Granier, which is nothing more than a short introduction to the world of testing and quality.

Minimize the impact of bugs by implementing automated tests

Once quality is taken into account in your process and your testing strategy is in place, an additional way to minimize the impact of bugs is to perform automated tests. These are much faster than manual tests. 

Some checks can take several hours when done manually, whereas an automaton can do them in a few minutes when simultaneous execution is allowed. 

This allows you to perform more tests, more frequently, and therefore to spot bugs faster and fix them sooner, before your users even notice or have time to complain about them. 

And you know what they say: the world belongs to those who catch the bugs early.

Moreover, manual tests, being performed by humans, can let bugs slip through due to lack of concentration or inattention, whereas automated tests, performed by robots, are generally more reliable and the reporting of anomalies is therefore more efficient.

Warning: this does not mean that test automation is the answer to everything, because it has its limits: automation only checks the paths that have been defined and is therefore efficient and precise on these paths, but it will not go any further. 

This is why it is also important to combine both manual and automated tests, and in particular to carry out exploratory tests, because if you only carry out automated tests, you run the risk of missing bugs on paths that have not been imagined beforehand. 

In other words, do as much testing as possible, both manual and automated, as soon as possible and everywhere. 

Bugs, catch them all!