Today I found a question in my mailbox.
Bart, I am solving a bug report. According to developer X (who created the bug report) you said that ZZZ happen. How can I reproduce this?
A normal question, no? In this particular case it is not.
Last week I got some feedback from one of our stakeholders. I was testing a feature that was failing. We call the feature that was failing feature simulation in our application. We also have criterion simulation and criterion trigger. The stakeholder told me that criterion trigger did not work. I still needed to investigate it. I believe in facts, and not what some stakeholder tells me that happens.
Later that day, I told our scrum master what I was doing and what I discovered so far. I told him that I discovered that the simulation was not working anymore. I also told him that one of our stakeholder had an issue with triggering.
Then it was time to leave for me. The weekend passes. On Monday I looked at our electronic scrum board. I saw that someone added a new story was to our scrum board! Our sprint ends in two days. We did not finish all our planned stories yet. How is this possible? What has happened?
The new story is a bug report. The bug report is a strange one. It does not contain any description. It only contains a title.
What do I write in a bug report?
- A good title:
- The title summarizes the problem as best as possible. Because it it often put in bug lists, it is important to be as specific as possible. But also not too long.
- A description:
- The description describes the problem as it happens. I always place steps to reproduce the problem in a description. When reading those steps, the developers should be able to reproduce the problem. This is why I never create a new report on rumors. I also attach a picture or a little screencast to the bug report. Our bug reports have some meta data. There are fields for severity or the status of that bug. What is lacking is a field to fill in a software version. The software version is also present in the description of the bug report
The product owner decides afterwards what the priority of this new bug will be. He talks to know the impact to several people about this new bug.
Remember that a bug report is to help the developers to fix a problem. Developers can fix problems faster if the description of that problem is better described.