Effective Test Reporting - Defect Report
When we talk about the defect report, there are definitely customized versions you might be using as per the templates agreed and accepted by respective company, but when you are sharing the defect reports we need to have the clear motive that this is for helping your superiors to take the decisions based on it. Following check-list might help you in completing it in business sense as well. (it doesn't mean you are doing poor job).
Defect summary
In this you can highlight high level areas which will give the clear idea about the defect and if there are any mismatches related to these areas, there is no further investigation needed
- Release number and details
- Environment on which defects have been identified
- If it is web based application then browser details
- Your details
- Date of execution and defect identification
Priority and severity
This is very important aspect of defect but mostly misused as well, having both priority and severity narrows down the decision making about which one to fix first. Another advantage is we can club all the defects based on this and get them resolved in one go.
Dependencies and impact of defect
If there are certain test cases which are blocked because of the bug then that has to be bring in to light which helps in improving the test coverage and reducing the quality risks.
Sometimes it might also happen that although the test case is not blocked but the functional flow is not completely accomplished unless defect fixes, those dependencies also needs to be bring in to light in the defect report.
Mentioning the defects which cannot be reproduced but identified
Many time it so happen that you get the defect but then you cannot reproduce it second time, those might be conditional defect and never to be ignored, bring those defects in the report and mention about their category.
Feature-wise / module-wise classification
I have personally seen this type of distribution helps a lot in the decision making and getting all threads connected when it comes to debug them for a developer, so try to have the product distribution in features or modules and share the defect classification based on them that helps a lot.
I hope that helps.