What do you mean by intermittent bug? How will it happen? Who will be responsible whether the tester or developer? Explain with an example

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If we mark a case as bug, and we forget to do retesting on that case and still bug in open stage for several cycle then such bug is called as Intermittent bugBoth testing and development team responsible for such type of error, because Developer – Not fix that issue when it mark as bug Tester – Not retest that issue which he/she mark as bug

I think there is huge disconnect in the answer above.
A intermittent Bug is the Bug which is present in the Application/Product but seen ocassionally in alternative releases. There is no specific ways to reproduce it and hence it is little difficult to trace it out.

It can be logged into the defect tracking but differed until a special test is done to locate it.

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vvbalaji

  • Mar 30th, 2008
 

I would like to add a point to the above answer.Intermittant bug need not be in alternate builds.It can also be in the same build.we may not be able to reproduce the bug all the time. Such bugs are interittant.It is both the tester and developers responsibility to find the scenario in which it is occuring and to close it.Till that that bug can be under observation

srikich

  • Aug 1st, 2008
 

If a bug is hard to reproduce and if the tester hasn't incoorperated any reproducible steps It will be hard for the developer to fix that specific bug band that bug will be left open for several cycles.These bugs are called Intermittent bugs. Correct me If I am wrong

Hi

 As for as my knowledge 'Intermittent bug' is a bug which is not able to reproduce in all the cases, it will occurred in some special cases.

  For ex: We have a Report module, in that we have a monthly report, in this page we have a dropdown as below

        Date Range Dropdown : Values : This week ( First day of current week to Current date)
                                                                        (Ex: 25-Aug-2008 to 30-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.

Srinivas     

Which means that unexpected bug or Incident. which happened rarely in the execution. Which can' be reproducible. Both the Tester and the Developer have the responsiblity to the find the bug  with different scenarios and should fix it. If the Tester found this bug frequently means it should be documented, evidence of proof(Screenshot), Test Data, etc...

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The bug which occurs on one build/event and then it is not seen in another build/event is called intermittent bug. Mostly this happens due to the calls made by the system is not consistant.These kind of bugs are very closely watched and then we need to put lot of efforts in reproducing these.

Example: You are having the embeded system which send the message to the server/dll when you so specific business function. Now when this business function is executed it triggers some other activity and that does not happen every time. Sometime it happens and sometime it does not do anything. This can be for several reasons like comm channel, message queue etc. So we need to put trace logs at the code level to identify these kind of issues.

Hope this helps

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iprabhash83

  • Oct 28th, 2009
 

Intermittent Bug: It is a kind of bug/defect that can be observed rarely, it does not occur always. I mean to say that there is no guarantee that if you are trying to reproduce it then you would be able to do it. If you perform the same operation 3-4 times or more than this then such bug can be observed. Such kind of bug occurs due to different kind of environment used or some other reason. Sometimes it can be seen and sometime not.

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An intermittent bug occurs when unanticipated conditions trigger an unexpected error in software.  It arises periodically and often appears to be random (although this isn't truly the case).  The random nature of intermittent bugs is due to the fact that its cause is unknown.  If testers knew the preconditions and actions necessary to trigger the defect, it would no longer be an intermittent bug.

For example, when I was testing a grant management software for a local charitable foundation, the application would sometimes lock the director out of the granting process.  This occurred periodically, not all the time.  And it took the test team a long time to finally understand the preconditions and actions that caused this behavior.  Once we understood these details, we could consistently reproduce the issue.

As a tester, I would send an email out to the entire test team which explains the symptoms and ask them to alert me when they experience them during their test runs.     

Ultimately, it is the tester's responsibility to understand the symptoms and to explain them to the developer in a defect report.  In response, it is the developer's responsibility to suggest likely causes as well as actions to take to produce the defect.  In this way, the developer and tester must work together to identify the circumstances that produce the intermittent bug.    
 

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Manish Dwivedi

  • Jan 17th, 2018
 

Per ISTQB, there is no term as intermittent bug. The only thing one should understand that there is a very specific pattern which is not reproducible every time, but it does not mean that it is intermittent. It must have a specific pattern which is found in most of the cases in root cause analysis. One should try to focus on other than common aspects to find out the root cause.
If as a tester you are not able to find out the pattern then try to get help from the developer/architect of the application, I am sure by thorough step-by-step analysis one can find out the root cause.
Sometimes, we find the infrastructure responsible for the bug, but again it is not intermittent.
Hope this clear the doubt.

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