Devs have a special ability to talk testers out of bugs by claiming said bugs cannot be fixed. It goes something like this…

Tester: This UI control doesn’t do what I expect.
Dev: It’s not a bug. It’s a technology constraint. It is not possible to make it do what you expect.

My current AUT uses a third party .Net grid control called “ComponentOne” and I often hear the following:

Dev: It’s not OUR bug. It’s a ComponentOne bug.

I’m fine with these dev responses and even grateful for the info. Where it becomes a problem is when I get soft and don’t log the bug. Criteria for a bug should not include whether we believe it can be fixed or not. Log it! There is so much value in even non-fixable bugs!

Our bug list should capture what is known about the quality of the AUT. If we know the UI widget does not work the way we want it to, let’s document that. Who knows, if these non-fixable UI widget bugs keep getting logged, maybe we can justify using a different UI widget. But a more likely result, from my experience, is that devs will do everything in their power to fix everything on that bug list. And they will suddenly become more creative and write a hack for the technology constraint that earlier looked impossible to overcome.

So don’t be fooled like the storm troopers in front of the Mos Eisley Cantina. If you start hearing “These are not the bugs you’re looking for”, snap out of it!