What a Good Bug Report Should Contain

The elements of a good bug report covered in a step by step process for you. Use this bug tracking template and look like a legend amongst mortals

What a Good Bug Report Should Contain


Identifying a bug is the first and foremost thing, and the most essential part of testing is documenting the identified software defects. Have you never done bug reporting? If not, but on your seatbelt. This article discusses how to write an ideal bug report and the information you should include on your bug reporting template to look like a pro in front of your colleagues


As bug reporters, it is unnecessary to share the bug’s entire discovery process during software testing. Avoid sharing a 10-page error report with the developer, it won't help you or them. The bug report template is inevitable when you need to generate user feedback when your application is in production or the app testing phase. A standardized bug report template makes the reporting effortless and helps in identifying the bug report’s essential information faster.


Top List of Elements Included in a Perfect Bug Report (The kind that makes people want to tattoo your name)


Bug Title

The title should be unique to identify in the entire bug lists. The title should encompass a bug summary (Note: Title should reflect the defects).


Personal Information

An individual is associated with each bug report. Personal information is vital in an issue report because if the developer lacks clarity with the error report or wants some inquiry related to bugs. This data will support the developer to reach out to the concerned person promptly.

The bug reporting tools like Remoteworkly.co, GitHub, Trello, JIRA will automatically accomplish personal information. Whereas in manual bug reporting, never forget to include the following personal data.


  1. Name of the individual who reported the bug
  2. Date of submission
  3. Team or Title


If the bug reporter or the testers does not belong to your team, include additional information such as Email Id & Contact details for future communication.


Bug Description

Bug description in the report should be to the point i.e simple, and precise on the difficulty (Give a brief detail about the bug). Detailed description permits the developer to recognize the error seriousness and prioritize the bug fixing instantly. It's all in the detail, and sometimes this process can be tedious, and tools like remoteworkly.co/show automate that saving you 10-15 hours a week


Extended Bug Report

The extended report should comprise these three essential pieces of information: expected behavior, actual behavior, and the steps to recreate the bugs.


Environment Specifications

Sometimes bugs are provoked due to some existential factors such as operating system, OS version, Device type, memory, battery, and much more. So it is necessary to share the environmental specifications with the developers. It will allow engineers to discover the issue promptly.


Issue reporting tool automatically captures the network logs, device specification, the user steps, and more. It is a significant reason to rely on bug tracking tools. It makes debugging smoother with exact data.

Again, this entire flow is automated and taken care of in remoteworkly.co/show


Application/ Software Version

Mention the software version or app version so that the application development team can easily refer and efficiently fix the flaws.


Priority

Assign priorities for the bugs. The developer can determine the major and minor issues and start working on the high priority bugs. High, medium, and low are the priorities of the bugs. Project managers update this prioritization of the error.


Severity

All the bugs are not equal - the client would say otherwise ;). Some errors may cause minor issues and major problems on your mobile/web application. It is necessary to assign levels of severity. Levels of severity include Blocker, Critical, Major, Minor, and Trivial. With the severity, the developer can identify the actual effect of the bugs on your application.


Bug Status

The status of the report shows the pipeline of defect management.  Bug status is valuable for quality assurance. New, Open, Assigned, Fixed, Test, Verified, Closed, Rejected, Not Reproducible, Reopen, Deferred, Duplicate, Can’t Be Fixed, Need More Information are the bug status you can mention on the report.



Attachments

Employ screen recording to demonstrate the user flows and admit visual proof, screenshot attachments for better perception. Attachment helps the developer to view the exact error and resolve the error in the shortest time.


Improve the QA Process With Defect Report Templates


Bug Reporting with JIRA

Today numerous companies utilize Jira software. It is a well-known issue ticketing & project tracking software. The tool permits you to communicate individually with the team and also facilitates ticket tracking.


JIRA allows users to generate a customized report, and each field is clearly defined. Jira custom fields allow you to add or exclude in the error report based on the project. Users can set up a notification system in Jira. Jira provides other tool integration. (It works with other Atlassian products like Bitbucket)


You can initiate the error report by clicking the “create” button on the menu. Once the team recognizes the bug, they can prioritize the error on the backlogs. The tool directly passes the information to the software developers/engineers who developed the Bitbucket code. Engineers can start their error fixing with this Jira ticket.


Issue Tracking on GitHub


The error tracking feature in GitHub is known as Issues. The title and description of the software are to provide a short brief about the bug. Like email labels, the tool has color code labels where users can easily filter and classify the errors.


With the milestones option, the users can connect the issue with the specific project or classify the problems with particular features. Assign the error fixing to anyone on the team just by mentioning the assignee.


Just by clicking, you can add and modify the milestones, labels, and assignees on the tool.

Issue Tracking in GitLab

GitLab is an open-source web-based DevOps tool with issue tracking functionality, wiki, and deployment pipelining features. It is one of the advanced issue tracking software.

With GitLab software, you can collaboratively perform work planning, problem-solving, and share development ideas.


You can efficiently work with many errors simultaneously by utilizing the Issue boards, Issue list, Epic, and Issue reference.


Utilize cross-linking issues & related issues features, and you can mark the related errors. When you view the one, the associated issue will automatically list in the corresponding issue section. This feature helps to view the past work and bug duplication. Now you can create an actionable report with GitLab with few clicks.


Wrap up

The quality bug report is the key to the dev team to locate and resolve the errors more effectively. A good quality bug report minimizes the unnecessary confusion among the testers and development team. Include the above-mentioned indispensable elements in the report. We highly recommend the bug reporting tools that make the debugging more significant and reduce the tester’s time and effort. Issue reporting tool simplifies the bug reporting, and developers can immediately work on the error fixing with the real-time information. Adoption of error reporting tools will speed up the development cycle.














Vaibhav Namburi
Founder

I'm the Founder of BugReporting. I've helped build multiple multi-million dollar companies and I love approaching Start Ups through product-lead growth