What are some best practices for collaborating with team members using bug tracking tools?

Establishing a unified repository for defects is key to the success of projects and programs involving cross-functional and multi-vendor delivery teams. Typically, each team tends to adopt their organization's defect tracking tool, resulting in a challenging scenario with distinct information. This necessitates significant manual efforts to collate the current status of a defect. To mitigate this challenge, it is crucial to reach an agreement on a program or project-level defect management system, encompassing statuses and workflows that are suitable for all involved teams. This system should offer accessibility to all team members and stakeholders, ensuring a shared and consistent source of defect-related information.

Establish ownership, utilize tags and priorities strategically, foster open communication, and maintain meticulous documentation for seamless teamwork and issue resolution.

choosing the right tool, following a consistent workflow, writing clear and concise bug reports, assigning and updating bug statuses, and providing feedback and support.

A good practice in this regard is to make a chart, diagram or any visual representation of this flow and share it with the team. This way there's an easy and non-intimidating way for anyone to remember it. Also avoids a lot of conflict between members since they have a common reference.

Identifying an optimal defect lifecycle workflow is an essential step. Projects adhering to the Waterfall or Agile methodologies may need to tailor their defect lifecycle to align with their unique ways of working and delivery pace. Similarly, the defect lifecycle suitable for small to medium projects might not be suitable for larger transformation programs due to their inherent complexity and the involvement of numerous cross-functional teams. Establishing the appropriate defect statuses and transitions, along with mandatory data points collection such as "Test Phase", "Due Date", "Root Cause" etc.during the lifecycle, facilitates effective Defect Turnaround Trend, Defect Leakage Analysis, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) etc.

To facilitate easier defect review and prompt issue resolution within cross-functional teams, the following considerations should be observed: 1. Employ a meticulously structured bug reporting template that provides comprehensive information to support the development team. 2. Ensure that the bug report contains relevant logs, screenshots, or, a brief video illustrating the issue to help a quicker understanding. 3. Essential information such as the test environment specifications, the test data used, and the precise date and timestamp of when the issue occurred is indispensable.

It's good for testers to put the hat of the developer when writing a bug report. This is your way of helping your colleague fix the bug quicker and better when you provide him with the all the relevant details and any screenshots or extracts that give them more insight into the issue. It's also good if possible to include the developer in your investigation when preparing your bug report for several reasons. It may be that the bug is due to wrong steps you're following, it may be that the developer provides you information that helps you prepare a better bug report and also they themselves may ask you to include some specific information to help them. Think of the bug as a collaboration tool not a competition between you and the developer

Delayed updates to the bug status contribute to issues accumulating and being neglected. Additionally, tagging relevant individuals or watchers and providing comments to track progress and address queries can be beneficial for the team.

This is a very important step although it's often not done properly. Tester and Developers should both provide their feedback in the bug report as to the result of the investigation and how to avoid similar issues in the future. Many times an issue may reappear in later versions of the software for any reason, a clear and detailed feedback in the bug report helps the team in the future save so much time and effort investigating and fixing it. This is you and your colleagues helping your future selves, you'll be very thankful for it when it's needed.

The bug tracking isn't just for the QA team; it's a team-wide responsibility. If QA is thinking about tweaking the process, it's only fair to loop in the developers for their input. The end game here is to work together so we can all hit our quality goals. One team doing one thing without input from the other is not collaborating.

- Spend some time searching if this issue or similar ones have been reported before. - If possible reuse old bug report as it will collect the history and updates on this specific issue. - Encourage your colleagues who are working on the bug to provide sufficient details to their debugging, results and recommendations. - Link your bug with the proper testcase(s) and user story so it's clear which steps reproduced it and which requirement(s) was affected.

An essential best practice for defect verification lies in the meticulous collection of test evidence to prove the complete resolution of the issue. It is imperative that this test evidence include relevant logs, screenshots, or short videos that demonstrate the issue's successful resolution. Additionally, noting the specific build version in which the issue was addressed and capturing the root cause during the verification process significantly contributes to the efficient closure of the defect. Moreover, during defect verification, the execution of regression tests to validate that the defect fixes have not introduced any adverse impacts to the relevant functional area is a valuable piece of information to document and present.

1. How many channels we have to communicate about the Bug - I would suggest all of them. 2. Once bug is raised would suggest asked developer to provide - deployment ID or version ID, this would help in long term, as we can track them in that deployment what changes has been made to fix this as developer would keep changing 3. Currently concern is how we can minimize P1 defects hitting production as this hurt us in big time to fix them and functionality around it, due to this we need to test core functionality as well or need to scrap the development at times. Start fresh from scratch again as this doesn't give confidence to Product Owner