Uncovering a Critical State Update Bug and Building Automated Tests for Cleanr Group

The Challenge

Cleanr Group needed automated test coverage built for one of their applications. During the scoping and exploratory testing phase, the application's UI was displaying stale or inconsistent data in certain views — the state wasn't updating correctly in response to user actions. The bug was intermittent and context-dependent, which is exactly the type of issue that automated tests based only on happy-path flows would miss entirely.

Our Approach

Before writing a single automated test, our engineer conducted structured exploratory testing to understand the application's behaviour — deliberately probing state transitions, navigation flows, and data refresh patterns. This surfaced the state bug clearly: specific sequences of user actions left the UI showing outdated data without any visible indicator. The bug was documented with precise reproduction steps. Automated test suites were then built to cover the confirmed user journeys, with dedicated test cases for the state update scenarios to ensure the bug class couldn't silently reappear after a fix.

The Outcome

The critical state update bug was identified and reported with clear reproduction steps, enabling the development team to diagnose and fix the root cause. The automated test suite built around the affected flows became a permanent regression guard. The Cleanr Group team gained both immediate bug resolution and long-term test coverage that would catch similar issues in future releases.

Tools & Techniques