To make things easier, I'm making this Guideline to help you report bugs to make it easier to both the testers and coders.
I. Follow the Rules If the coders asks not to test certain areas or to test some areas even more then do it. There is a good reason that why he/she wants those areas untouched or to be mass tested.
II. Writing the Report A. Triple Test & Refresh Make sure that you Triple test any bug that you find. Sometimes it may be a one time bug. There are also server side problems that could have caused it to happen that one time. Laggy times can also interrupt you from communicating with the server.
B. The actual Report 1) Header
The header should be the place where the bug was found. This makes it much easier to isolate the bug. It also helps a lot because two totally different areas can have very similar features and a title of the bug won't just do.
A good example is:
My Control Panel/Overview 2) Errors
If you are given any error of any kind, it is of utmost important that you post it. This is the most important part of the report because with this information, coders can know what went wrong.
A good example is:
CODE
Warning: Division by zero in /home/is047s3n/public_html/1337v5/scripts/settings/overview.php on line 67
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/is047s3n/public_html/1337v5/scripts/settings/overview.php:67) in /home/is047s3n/public_html/1337v5/scripts/global_code.php on line 228
3) Description
Try to describe the bug as detailed as possible. This way it's easier to infer what went wrong. If you provide enough detail on how the bug worked, it can be possible to fix other related bugs.
4) Suggestion
When you find a bug try to make a suggestion on how to fix it. You don't have to be a Coding Guru and tell then what scripts to use, but a simple
"I think that if you changed this feature or added that feature it could work". Believe it or not, this actually helps the people making the scripts because that way, they already have a way in which it could be fixed.
III. General testing Suggestions - Test in as many different OS, Browsers and with different Settings. This way we might determine if it's a bug related to a certain OS, Browser or Setting.
- Test the bugs that other testers have reported. This is to confirm that such a bug exists and that it wasn't a one time glitch.
- Don't report the same bugs as other testers. You might think that there is nothing wrong with this, but everyone describes and reports bugs differently and the coder might think that it's different bugs.
Any suggestions and/or addittions?
IP: I'm going to pin this thread for future reference. If you want to unpin it, fine by me.