Arjuna (a prince from the Indian epic Mahabharata) was a highly skilled warrior ,his primary skill being archery.

In the epic there is a chapter on how he won the princess’s hand by competing in a royal competition .

Task was to shoot of a fish in the eye ( which was sitting on the top of a pole and rotating ) by looking at it’s reflection in the water.

Hard eh ?

Arjuna did it and won his prize. He accomplished it by applying his archery skills through his legendary concentration levels. Legend says that only Arjuna could have done that because he could concentrate perfectly on the fish’s eye and nothing could distract him (no direct vision of the target ,target being in motion,high pressure siituation etc)

We testers encounter similar challenging situations often .

We have no direct vision of the target == only a symptom of the problem to start with.

target is in motion == bugs “move” as software changes, bugs “hide”,bugs “hide” and “come back”

pressure is usually high

But one thing is different ,we can not just look at only the fish’s eye or a fish eye.

While investigating a bug,a tester needs to constantly focus,defocus or have simultaneous multiple focus all over the SUT.Pardon the cliche but we need to see the bigger picture as well.

What the UI is doing,what do the logs say,what does the task manager say,what do the input/output routes have,what other system elements is the problem impacting,what is the impact on the project,what would be the impact on the customer,why has the problem come back,is it really a problem.

are we looking at a fish with mutiple eyes ? or even a shoal (we are looking at a fish’s eye when we see another fish)?

I think we do !