Proper reporting of discovered software bugs is a necessary skill for every test engineer. It considerably influences quality of web site testing, desktop testing or mobile application testing.
If a tester hasn’t mastered the skill of reporting errors, his or her software defects are often marked by the developers as “cannot reproduce”, “not a bug”, “invalid bug” and so on. Such labels upset testers, they mean that the developers will not fix the defects and the efforts spent on the defects search and documenting turn to be wasted.
The Main Reasons of Error Reports Failures Are:
- insufficient or ambiguous description of the error;
- unclear, inconsistent or incomplete steps to reproduce the error;
- incorrect or insufficient description of the test environment;
- mistakes in setting the test environment for the e-commerce testing, mobile testing, game testing and so on.
If an error report is improperly written or doesn’t give enough information to the developers, it is useless.
Mistakes in setting the tests are a frequent cause of documenting invalid errors. They make up about half of all the defects marked by the developers as “invalid” and declined. Such errors often happen because of ambiguous specification requirements of the software product and inattentiveness of the testers.
Experts in manual and automated testing recommend clarifying the ambiguous issues before preparing for the testing process and always pay attention to details.