Bug Reports

CS443 Blog Post

https://reqtest.com/testing-blog/bug-report-template-good-bug-reports/

For this week’s blog I looked at bug reports and a template to perhaps help create better bug reports. Firstly, a software bug essentially is an error that produces unexpected or incorrect results, therefore when something is not working in the software as it should be it is inferred as a bug in the software. A bug report is a document that is extremely useful in communication to the developers that tell which parts of the software/application are not behaving as expected. These reports should have enough information that helps the developers pinpoint the exact issue helping them resolve it. The quality of the bug reports is crucial as a high-quality report reduces the chances of the bug in the future. While a bad bug report may cause the developer not to replicate the bug and not be able to fix it. Well what does a good bug report consist of? Well a good bug report has the following characteristics

• A good bug report has a unique identifier number to easily identify the bug and set it apart from the rest
• It contains all the information required to reproduce the bug and fix the issue while prioritizing the bug for fixing and outlining the expected behavior
• It usually covers a single bug, for multiple issues multiple reports should be created
• A good bug report can be easily understandable by the tester and the developer, implicating that the bug report should portray the same meaning between those who created the report and those who will be trying to fix the bug
• A good bug report follows a standardized bug report template while promoting collaboration between others and allows the bug to be fixed in the shortest amount of time

Bug reporting software’s such as ReQtest will help you in your bug tracking initiatives. Usually bug reporting software will help you report, document, store, manage, assign, close and archive bug reports. ReQtest is one of these tracking software’s that allows you to create a professional bug report. The template consists of fifteen different fields of information ranging from the ID number used to uniquely identify the bug report to the frequency of the bug occurring to the linked requirements that are linked to the bug report. Looking at the site you can see what each field requires and does exactly. Finally, after the bug report template has been used a checklist is usually required. Is the bug report clear to follow? Was the bug reported previously? Have you tried to reproduce said bug with the help of your own bug report? And so forth.

I thought this article was interesting as it gave me some good insight on how a bug report should be and such. The way it explains the bug report template is straightforward to pretty much any audience along with the entire article which is very nice to newcomers of the topic. Coming into this I had a general idea of what bug reporting consisted of but this article made me understand more of it. Overall I liked this article as it was informative and straight to the point.