Reporting bugs

This post is on request from one of my fellow colleague come friend, a programmer. And when a programmer is asking a tester to write about bug report than you know it is important. Writing good bug reports is vital let me elaborate you why.

"The true measure of a great tester is that they find bugs, analyze them thoroughly, report them skillfully and end up creating a development team that understands the gaps in their own skill and knowledge." - Dr. James Whittaker(Software Architect @ Microsoft)

Thus a nicely reported bug presents the tester found the bug, analyze it throughly, understand it properly and ready for the debate why it is a bug and why it should be fixed. For your seniors or people in management it represents your ability to think, approach, representation and skills as a tester.

When reporting you can not forget following parameters,

• Summary(Should be nice, clean, simple and self descriptive)
• Description(Steps to reproduce with notes if required for each steps)
• Environment details(Operating system, browser with version, application built number etc.)
• Screenshot(One or more screen shots including indication)

Remember each and every parameters I stated above have its own importance in report. I am considering that first three points need no description of its importance. But I want to add something about the last one, Screenshots. It is more important than you think of it is. Does not matter application developers sitting with you in the same room or in other country. They will refer to the image more than words written in description. Research shows that a human understands 60% more with images rather than descriptive texts.

Feel free to leave a comment. Share your feelings about this post, was it helpful? does it contain ambiguous data? or anything. You are always welcome :)