Excuses given by testers when bugs are reported by clients

Here is a list of reasons given by testers when they do not report or even find (important) bugs.

I found this bug BUT...

1. It was not approved for submission (by the test lead/ test manager/ fellow testers/ programmer).

2. The bug report was rejected. (never mind the reason of rejection!)

3. This bug is reported but as part of another bug report which is still open.

4. Did not report it because it is intermittent in nature.

5. Reported it verbally due to lack of time.

6. So many bugs are still open. It would not have made sense to report yet another bug.

I did not find this bug BECAUSE...

7. I was not informed that this functionality is complete (and to be tested).

8. This bug is only visible with negative testing and all our test cases are positive test cases.

9. There is no existing test case to find this bug.

10. The test case to find this bug is not in our test plan.

11. This bug can be found only by the client's test cases which we do not have.

12. This functionality was blocked during my test.

13. I have tested this module briefly (I was just assigned this module OR this module was re-assigned to another tester quite early).

14. I have been busy re-testing the numerous bug fixes.

15. They stopped the testing before I had the time to test this.

16. It worked fine the last time I tested it. They must have changed the application after that.

17. It worked fine with the test data that I used.

18. This bug is related to the latest changes in the requirements, about which I was not informed.

19. This bug is specific to the client's environment.

20. If you examine it carefully, it is not really a bug.

Don't worry; we have all used excuses one time or the other. By the way, did you note the similarity to the top replies given by programmers when their applications do not work correctly?

When you lead a team of testers, you should watch out for these remarks and make your team culture and test process robust enough to prevent these problems from occurring.