Your All-in-One Guide for Effective Bug Reporting

Last updated on August 30th, 2023 at 03:19 pm

Bug Reporting

As the term explains itself, bug reporting is the reporting of bugs for the development team to resolve. It’s as simple. At least when it comes to defining them. Bug management tools can be used to report bugs in a simple spreadsheet. But there are quite a number of fields you have to fill up such as:

• Bug ID
• Project Name
• Bug Summary
• Description
• Bug Priority
• Bug Severity
• Assigned to
• Status
• Reporter
• Affects Version
• Environment
• Component/Module
• Attachments
• Test Case link
• User Story link

Severity vs. Priority

“Priority” and “Severity” are the terms most commonly used when talking about the importance of bugs among teams.

Priority

• How fast a bug has to be fixed?
• Customer requirements define the priority status.
• Values can be blocker, critical, major, minor, or trivial.

Severity

• The impact of the bug on the operation of the system determines its severity.
• Values can be blocker, critical, major, minor, or trivial.

Bug Report

To fix a bug, you need to first report it. But it’s not all. How you report it plays a big role in getting the bugs fixed. So, what are the characteristics of a good bug report?

• It must incorporate reproducible steps.
• Be specific – there should be no ambiguity in bug summary and description.
• Add required screenshots and error logs wherever required.

Now that we know what a good bug report is, let’s have a look at some important tips that will help you in writing a good bug report.

• Immediately report a problem if you’re using bug management tools
• Reproduce the bug twice before writing the bug report
• Test the same bug occurrence on another similar module as well.
• Write a good bug summary that gives a brief about the bug.
• Read bug report before saving or submitting.
• Be careful with your language.

Furthermore, one of the most important parts of the report is bug status. That’s what your boss wants to know. Is it fixed? Is it still being fixed? Or no work has been done? Your boss wants to see the progress and that’s what he’s supposed to do. Following is a list of the most common bug statuses:

• Open: Bug that is yet to be validated
• In progress: Bug is validated and is being fixed
• Not a bug: Bug is marked as “not a bug” when its misinterpreted and the system works according to the specifications
• Deferred: Bug is deferred to the future cycle if it can’t be addressed in a particular one.
• Duplicate: The same bug is logged by the QA team.
• Fixed: Bug has been fixed and is ready to be verified by the QA team in the next build.
• Reopened: Bug is not fixed, QA reopens the bug
• Closed: Verified and fixed bugs are marked as “closed”

Why use bug management tools?

Let’s put it this way, how not using bug management tools can trouble you?

• Important issues get lost
• Project teams waste too much time figuring out the stability of the project.
• Customers don’t know the progress of bug fixing activity.
• The developer remains unaware that they’ve been assigned an issue.
• Getting bug status reports takes too long.

So, play smart, be safe.

In this article, I aimed to provide a brief overview of the bug reporting and what steps can you follow to make this process more effective.