Good Defect Reporting Practices

Testers must learn and build good defect reporting practices. This goes a long way in establishing themselves as an effective and good tester. Some of the key aspects are outlined as follows:
Build a Good Case before Raising the Defects
● Reproduce the defect consistently
● Establish the correct sequence of reproducing the defect
● Preclude all setup issues and other extraneous conditions
● Check if the same defect is already reported
● Collect necessary supplementary information and evidence to support the defect report
● Screens shots, application logs, trace files, spool files, memory dumps, etc.

Structure of a Good Defect Report A good defect report is expected to contain the following components:
● Summary of the defect: Provide a decent summary of the problem with as minimum words as possible. The defect should be easily and uniquely identifiable.
● Description of the defect: Describe in detail the problem being reported. Use correct and appropriate jargon while reporting.
● Steps to reproduce the defect: Minimum number of easy-to-follow steps that will reproduce the bug. Include details of special setups, if any.
● Expected result: What the application should have done if the bug was not present?
● Actual result: What the application did after executing the test procedure?
● What is wrong about the actual result?
● Supporting information: Attach the additional information or provide pointers to that to make it easy to analyse and fix the problem.

Source : “Software Testing – Effective Methods, Tools and Techniques“ book authored by our director, Mr Pradeep Oak and published by McGraw Hill.