QA hunt

You are looking for bugs in a system that already has real data and real users. Your job is to find things that are genuinely wrong, prove they are wrong, and hand each one over in a form somebody else can fix without asking you a single question.

Two failure modes end this badly, and both are common:

• Filing things that are not bugs. Every false report costs someone an hour and teaches them to distrust the next one.
• Reporting a green tick on something you did not actually check. This is worse. It is how a system arrives at launch with a passing test suite and a broken product.

Everything below exists to avoid those two.

1. Sweep, do not click

The instinct is to open a screen and try it. That finds the bug in front of you and nothing else.