Troubleshooting

4 min read

Find the message or problem you saw below, and how to fix it. Most of what looks like a failure is Oracle telling you it can’t answer, instead of guessing.

”Not something this data can answer”

You asked about something your project doesn’t record.

Which tester is fastest? How many defects will we have next month?

Hawzu doesn’t record how long a person takes to work through a test case, and nothing predicts future counts. Oracle won’t rank your team on a made-up number or guess at the future.

Questions about duration, effort, cost, speed, who is fastest, or what will happen next all get this answer. A believable answer to a question that can’t be answered would be worse, because it would look like it worked.

”Which did you mean?”

Your question could be answered but was too vague, so Oracle asked one short question back with two to four answers as buttons.

Show me the important ones Which did you mean? High priority test cases · Open critical defects · Releases at risk

Select one and Oracle answers it. Answering counts as asking again: Oracle works out your original question again with your answer added. That is slower than removing a condition.

”There is no member called Sarah”

A name in your question didn’t match anything in the project.

Oracle looks names up instead of guessing, so you get this message instead of an empty result. An empty table for a misspelled name would look like good news.

Check the spelling, and check that the person is on this project, not only in the workspace.

The Count Looks Wrong

Read the conditions before you doubt the data. Every answer shows Understood as: the conditions Oracle used, with the exact values. That is almost always where a surprising number comes from.

Two that catch people out:

“The last 10 days” is shown as the actual date. If that date isn’t what you meant, the count won’t be either.
A person’s name is shown as the team member it matched. Two people with similar names can be mixed up.

Select the × on a condition to remove it and the answer updates straight away, without using AI. Comparing the count with and without one condition is the fastest way to find the one causing the problem. See How to Ask.

It Understood Something Differently

Remove the condition instead of rewriting the question.

Retyping makes Oracle work out the whole question again, and it may read some other part differently this time. So rewriting to fix one condition can quietly change another. Editing the conditions changes only what you touched.

The Answer Is Empty, and You Don’t Believe It

Remove conditions one at a time. The condition that changes the count from zero is the one that was wrong.

If every condition looks right and the answer is still empty, it probably is empty. But check what Oracle can see first: your role decides what you can ask about.

It Won’t Do the Sum

Oracle counts records, or records per group. It doesn’t add up or average a column, and it tells you so instead of estimating.

For example, the average of five releases’ pass rates isn’t the pass rate across those releases. Oracle won’t return a number that only looks like an answer.

Grouping has its own limits, and Oracle names each one when you hit it:

You asked	What comes back
`Test cases by title`	Cannot be grouped by Title, with a list of fields that can
`Defects by created date`	The same: a group per exact time isn’t useful
`Releases by verdict with their readiness scores`	A grouped answer counts rows; it cannot also work out computed columns
`Test cases by priority and severity`	Two fields crossed is a chart, not a list

For sums and averages, use Observatory.

The Kind of Question You Want Isn’t Available

Some kinds of question can’t be expressed in Oracle:

Not available	Instead
Conditions joined with or	Ask the two questions separately
Nested or bracketed conditions	Narrow in steps, checking each one
Sorting by more than one column	Sort by the one that matters most
Very large results	Narrow the question; results are capped

Conditions always combine with and. If you need either, ask twice. The two answers are often more useful apart.

A Chart Didn’t Redraw as Expected

Oracle draws from a set list of charts, plus a few day-by-day trends.

A time window your data doesn’t support, or a grouping outside that list, isn’t drawn. Oracle won’t draw a rough version instead. See Charts.

Nothing in the Documents Covers It

For questions about documents, Oracle says so plainly instead of filling the gap:

I couldn’t find that information in the Hawzu documentation.

If you expected an answer from your own documents, check that the topic is in Canon and that you are asking inside the right project, because Canon documents belong to a project. See Answers From Documents.