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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Bug

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/bʌɡ/nounCore term

In software engineering, bug means: A mistake in a program that makes it behave in a way nobody intended, such as showing wrong results, freezing or closing suddenly.

In Turkish: hata, yazılım hatası, kusur

How it is used

The most common word for a software problem in daily work. You find, report, track down and fix bugs. In formal reports and some tracking tools you will also see 'defect' or 'issue'.

Example sentences

  1. QA found a bug on the checkout page: the total doesn't update when you remove an item.

  2. This bug only shows up when two users edit the same record at the same time.

  3. Before we add new features, let's fix the critical bugs from last week.

Common collocations

  • fix a bug
  • report a bug
  • track down a bug
  • critical bug
  • bug report
  • fixTo change code so that a problem no longer happens. As a noun, 'a fix' is the change that solves the problem.
  • debugTo search for the cause of a problem in a program and remove it, often by running the code step by step and checking values.
  • reproduceTo make a bug happen again on purpose by following the same steps, so that you can see it yourself and find its cause.
  • crashTo stop working suddenly because of an error, so that the program closes or stops responding. Also a noun: 'a crash'.
  • ticketA record in a tracking tool such as Jira that describes one piece of work, like a bug, task or feature, and shows who owns it and its status.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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