Defect Advocacy: Influencing Developers

Abstract: A tester’s sole objective is to attempt and break a system in every possible way, spot as many as Defects he or she can without leaving any scope for others to find any Defect. There is no process, technology or methodologies which can help a tester find all Defects and claim that “this application/product is Defect free”.

Some of us may say that exploratory testing can find all Defects and the product can be claimed Defect free. It may be possible, but are we able to do exploratory testing every time a change is made in the system? Not really, because there is always time crunch for testing team.

One possible solution is to advocate fixing and closing of all the identified Defects which is not so easy task. How can you convince developer to fix each and every Defect that you raised against developed / changed code? This is where we need to become sales persons to sell the Defect to all stakeholders so that most of the Defects can be closed.

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Speaker's Profile

Ajay Baghel

Ajay Singh Baghel,
Project Test Lead,
Fiserv India


At Fiserv, Ajay is responsible for overall Testing activities in his project. He is also a designated Scrum Master of the Project Scrum team. Within a span of 1 year, Ajay has worked with the Test Practice Manager to assess projects for testing maturity and helped in identifying Short-term, mid-term and Long-term plans for the projects.

One of the key initiatives from Ajay was to work with the team on reducing defect rejection count and make sure that defects logged by the team are closed. He has implemented certain steps which are followed by the team at the time of defect creation in the defect management tool which has helped the team in reducing defect rejection. There had been significant drop in defect rejection, from 20% to 10% druing the 6 months in which this process was initiated. Within a year, the defect rejection count reduced to 7%. As of Jan 2013, defect rejection has come down to 3%.

Ajay has been awarded as Achiever of the year for 2011 for his overall contribution to the project-, Group- & organization-wide initiatives. He has also been awarded as Best Orator in technical debate at Fiserv in 2012.

Ajay has a Master degree in Information Technology and brings over 9 years of experience in Software testing.

Prior to working with Fiserv, Ajay was associated with Persistent Systems Limited.