No bugs- Well built app or inefficient QA?

As a QA, when you first start to test an application, the expectation that you have is there would be many bugs and that you are there to uncover them! Did I just read your mind? Well, just like you and I, most of the QA would love to log as much bugs as possible in the shortest duration. No matter if the bug is valid, invalid, or even duplicate, a bug is a bug and it brings in so much of happiness for a QA to uncover it!

There was an application that I had to test. It was an existing application, and I had to do some exploratory testing to uncover any missed defects. The application dealt with lot of critical data.My first impression when I looked at the application was that it would have lot of issues.The gut feeling was somewhere lies a critical bug,yet to be discovered. With that gut feeling, I began my bug hunt. Day 1 begins with lot of sign-ups, configurations and learning the existing behavior of the application. The real bug hunt started from Day 2, when I started validating the available data. There was huge volume of data in the application and I chose the data to validate on a random basis. Few days were spent on just validating the data. To validate a data, I had to google couple of times, visit  websites and finally do the comparison work. It was quite a big task, and I had a good time validating the data. I had prepared a spreadsheet to capture the discrepancies. But alas! I couldn't capture even one. From the random sample of data, I could not find any mismatch. The tester in me kept telling me that though the data was perfect, the application would have issues for sure. After a week of testing the data, I finally moved on to testing the application for other features.

Testing this application was no big deal. All it had was data, data and data. Filters to capture them, and few dashboard items to be configured. A pretty simple and easy to use application and surprisingly I could not find any critical or major bugs. Yes, there were few minor UI issues, but that was not something that a QA would be proud of. The absence of major bugs posed a serious question in my mind. Does absence of bug mean that the application was really built and tested very well ? Yes, it was an existing application and people were using it already. But as a skilled QA with many years of experience in discovering new bugs, it made me unhappy for the fact that I couldn't find a major bug! Was it that I was losing touch in finding bugs or did I  check it from just one perspective? The answer to that question depends on the next application that I would test!