2010-01-08 |  MalathiVanaraj  | Viewed: 2272  |    0

Characteristics of a Good Defect Report:

• Objective – criticising someone else’s work can be difficult. Care should be taken that
defects are objective, non-judgemental and unemotional. e.g. don’t say “your program
crashed” say “the program crashed” and don’t use words like “stupid” or “broken”.

• Specific – one report should be logged per defect and only one defect per report.

• Concise – each defect report should be simple and to-the-point. Defects should be reviewed
and edited after being written to reduce unnecessary complexity.

• Reproducible – the single biggest reason for developers rejecting defects is because they
can’t reproduce them. As a minimum, a defect report must contain enough information to
allow anyone to easily reproduce the issue.

• Explicit – defect reports should state information clearly or they should refer to a specific
source where the information can be found. e.g. “click the button to continue” implies the
reader knows which button to click, whereas “click the ‘Next’ button” explicitly states
what they should do.

• Persuasive –the pinnacle of good defect reporting is the ability to champion defects by
presenting them in a way which makes developers want to fix them.