Take Your Time

I find that one of the most important habits/skills of working in software testing is taking your time with bug reports, and doing things thoroughly. It saves me a lot of time later on.

You may think that getting a bug report written up as soon as possible would be the most efficient way of doing things, but it’s often not the case.

I think we’ve all encountered “Ticket Tennis” at some point.  You make a bug and assign it to a developer. They assign it back to you with “can’t recreate”, then you assign it back to them saying it’s definitely an issue.  Often these status changes can be over the course of a few days, too.

What if there were a way to reduce the number of times this happens?  You’ve read the title of the article, you know what’s coming.

The more information you can put into that initial bug report the better the chance that a developer will be able to recreate the issue.

Take your time.  It’s not a race.

Give a few variations of your bug recreation steps a try. Maybe the issue is something very specific that you’re doing. For example if you’re signing up for an account using an email address that uses the plus (+) symbol, try an address that doesn’t use it.

If you can narrow down where the bug is, it lowers the chance of Ticket Tennis, as there’s much less room for misunderstanding due to vague recreation steps.

“Sign-up fails when email address uses + symbol” is much clearer than “sign-up is broken”.

I’m not saying you should take 3 days to explore every possible variation of your inputs. Bugs should still be brought to people’s attention in good time, but you can save time later on by taking 30 minutes to explore some possibilities and refine your recreation steps first.