How To Write A Bug Report Your Developers Will Love

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Finding bugs on your website or products can be a major headache, so if you come across one, you want it fixed as soon as possible. So how do you write a good bug report? What information should you include in your document and what’s the best way to report a bug?

A bug report tells your developer everything they need to know to fix the bug – which part it occurs and how desperately you need it squashed. Thankfully, bug-monitoring tools like Bugpilot makes reporting bugs and collaborating with your developers a breeze.

Here, we’ll discuss what bug reports are, why they’re crucial for your product or app’s success, and how to make your own effectively. Let’s jump in!

What Is A Bug Report?

Writing a bug report is the best way to let your developers know that there’s an issue with your website or application that needs to be fixed. A bug report is a document that contains all the important information that a developer needs to tackle the issue, including the bug description, how serious it is, evidence, and the needed steps to reproduce.

Submitting a high-quality bug report makes all the difference in how fast your reported bug gets resolved. With Bugpilot, you can say goodbye to the manual processes and embrace efficient bug tracking by automatically collecting screenshots, frontend errors, and failed network requests and transforming them into bug reports.

Why Is It Important To Write A Good Bug Report?

Bugs are a significant cause of poor user experience. A study shows that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad experience. If you want to avoid frustrated users, developing a quality bug report is essential.

Here are the important reasons why you should write a good bug report:

Faster bug-fixing process: For effective software testing, software developers are provided with all the important information they need to know about the bug, such as its environment and the nature of the bug. By giving your developers a good bug report, they can find bugs faster and find an efficient way to solve them immediately using the information provided.

Resolve and prevent bugs from reoccurring: An effective bug report is an easy way to resolve a coding issue and prevent it from happening again. Writing a well-written and in-depth bug report helps developers identify, fix, and ensure that the same problem won’t happen again.

Sets a clear line of communication between developers and users: Bug reports are the main line of communication between developers and end-users. With a clear and concise bug report, developers understand the perspective of users easily and solve the bug and other issues adequately. Bugpilot can be especially helpful in this regard, as it comes with a reporting widget for users, allowing them to record the last two minutes of their screens before a bug happened. This is incredibly useful for developers, as they get a visual report of the behavior leading up to the bug, allowing them to recreate it easily.

How To Write An Effective Bug Report

Here are the steps that you should follow to write an effective bug report:

1. Use a clear and simple document title

First and foremost, the title of your document report should be simple and easy to understand. By looking at the title, the developer should be able to scan it quickly and instantly have an idea of what the bug report is about.

A good title should be clear, relevant, and self-explanatory, so developers could immediately grasp the general idea of the problem. Here are two examples of a good title for a bug report:

Critical UI Bug: Navigation Menu Overlaps Content On Mobile Devices

Image Glitch: Images Not Displaying Properly On Product Pages

2. Check if the bug is reproducible

Checking if your bug can be reproduced is an important step that you should not miss. If it is reproducible, clearly provide the needed steps to reproduce the bug – make sure to include all viable information, as this will make the process much smoother.

Below, we’ve provided an example of bug-recreation steps, check it out: :

Step 1: Log in as example@me.com

Step 2: Click on [button name]

Step 3: Fill out the fields with [content]

Step 4: Click [save]

Step 5. Error message displayed here [404: exact error message here]

3. Include the necessary information

The main purpose of submitting a bug report is to inform the developer of an existing issue that can affect user experience. To manage bugs more efficiently, your bug report should include all the important information that your developer may need. These include:

Bug ID: The bug ID helps make the process of identifying the bug easier. The ID/Title should provide a quick description of the bug.

Bug Description: The bug description shows complete information about the type and effect of the bug. You should include the steps to recreate the bug, what stage of the development the bug occurred, and the expected and actual results.

Bug Environment: Include the details of the app configuration and environment setup in your bug report. This could include the model number, manufacturer details, operating system version, OS, screen orientation, product version, battery state, etc. The behavior of the application varies depending on the environment and device used.

Severity: The severity of the bug shows its impact on the product and how much it’ll affect users. The test engineers decide the severity of the bug and rank them across five levels: Critical, Serious, Normal, Enhancement, and Suggestion.

Date and Time: Including the date and time when bugs are detected is also an essential element of your report.

Person Who Reported The Bug: Lastly, you may also include the name/s of the person/people who reported the bug. It gives developers an idea of who to contact whenever they have questions about a particular bug.

4. Collect Visual Evidence

During the testing and fixing process of the bug, written details play a useful role. However, you may also include visual information to help developers replicate bugs more easily. You can attach a photo or a screen recording.

You may also add screenshots to illustrate UI issues with Bugpilot’s screen recording feature, allowing you to uncover buggy sessions and attach the document to your bug report.

Crash logs can also be attached to the bug report and help developers find root causes for a bug quickly.

Bug Reporting Tips & Best Practices

Follow these best practices for an effective bug-reporting process:

1. Check if it’s a bug

Sometimes a bug is caused by different reasons such as environmental issues or users’ mistakenly logging it as a bug. Testers sometimes fail to do functionality reports, so to avoid wasting your time, you should do the following before writing a bug report:

Reproduce the issue again in different environments

Make sure there’s no environmental issue

Check the requirement specifications and ensure whether the functionality is failing or it is its natural behavior

Once you are sure that all these conditions are met, you can file a bug report.

2. Report the problem immediately

If you notice a bug, report it as soon as possible. This is especially important for user-facing bugs, as you want to ensure a bug is resolved before it has a chance to affect an end user.

If you’re testing during the development stage, reporting immediately is still a good practice, especially as you’ll be finding multiple bugs. Always report what you find before moving on, as you might find it difficult to detail the steps leading up to a bug if you do it later.

3. Take advantage of templates and bug-tracking tools

Take advantage of issue-tracking software to improve customer service and bug resolution. Tools like Bugpilot provide a structured bug report format that captures important information and ensures you include all necessary information.

Bugpilot’s smart bug tracker feature prioritizes and organizes detected bugs for efficient team collaboration. The tool automatically collects all the bug information, tracks the number of bugs resolved per week, includes a chat to increase collaboration amongst your teams, and assigns a person to each bug report.

4. Avoid bug duplication

When reporting a bug, you should make sure that the bug has not been reported yet. Check the list of known and open issues before raising a bug to avoid duplications, as it could cost more work for developers, which can impact the testing life cycle.

Bugpilot makes project management easy, thanks to

our Kanban boards bug trackers

. You’ll be able to see all existing reported bugs, those that are in the process of being fixed, and fixed bugs, for easy organization.

Bug Report Templates

Here are the different bug report templates that can increase help the efficiency of your QA teams and ensure clear communication with the developers.

Bugpilot Bug Template

Bugpilot’s AI-assisted troubleshooting helps you learn the reason behind the bug without having to reproduce it manually. With its excellent features, you can get all bug tickers automatically created and prioritized for you, replay sessions and see what your users experienced before and after the issue, highlight the root cause, and many more.

Jira Bug Report

Jira is also a popular issue and project tracking tool designed for development teams. Anyone in the organization in Jira can report any bugs, which is why it’s important to define a process and a template that everyone can easily use.

As you can see from the template, the instructions on how to reproduce the bug are included along with other elements should, such as:

Name/ID

Summary

Visual proof

Environment

Console logs

Steps to

ClickUp Bug Report

The Clickup bug template has the elements for a great bug report. It’s beginner-friendly, so even non-technical users can use this bug report easily. Its list view template contains all the important information on all tasks and subtasks, which are organized in columns.

By default, the columns should include the bug source, environment, dates, and comments, but you can customize them and choose between various column types.

Trello Bug Report

Trello is a free and super-easy-to-use project management tool, making it perfect for both small and medium-sized organizations. For your bug tracking purposes, you can set up a board called ‘bug tracking.’

All the elements of a well-reported issue are present, including:

Name/ID

Visual Proof

Summary

Source URL

Environment

Console Logs

Expected vs. actual results

Find And Fix Bugs In Seconds Today!

There’s no doubt that your bug report should be a high-quality document containing clear and precise information about the bug.

Your bug report serves as the main communication point between the tester, end user, developer, and manager. Writing a good bug report not only saves the resources of your company but also creates a good relationship between you and the developers.

Bugpilot comes with many features such as session replays, which allows you to see with your eyes what your users have experienced before and after the issue, and bug reports, allowing users to easily record their screen and report actionable bugs allowing you to detect and create bug reports with ease. Start your free trial today!