How to document software bugs?

by Nataliia Vasylyna | March 13, 2015 10:00 am

Experienced test engineers know that software testing is not as simple as it may seem. There are many issues that influence quality of a testing process.

Success of mobile application testing, desktop testing and web site testing largely depends on the tester’s skills to document the found defects properly and in time. There are many professional peculiarities of executing manual and automated testing. Good test engineers learn the existing best practices and elaborate their own methods.

Some Useful Tips for Novice Test Engineers:

Document the defect[1] at once as soon as it is found in course of manual testing. It isn’t wise to postpone writing an error report because one may forget the important details or omit some steps to reproduce the error after a while. As a result, the report will not give enough information to the developers, and it will be hard to reproduce and correct the issue.
It is a good practice to reproduce the discovered error for several times before logging it into the bug tracking tool. The error may reproduce once in several times, this peculiarity must be indicated in the report, or it may happen due to inattentiveness of the tester, not because of problems in the system.
Having found a software bug, one should verify if the similar mistake happens in other modules of the application. It is probable that the developer made the same mistake for several times.