A good tester will always try to reduce the repro steps to the minimal steps to reproduce; this is extremely helpful for the programmer who has to find the bug.
Remember that the only person who can close a bug is the person who opened it in the first place. Anyone can resolve it, but only the person who saw the bug can really be sure that what they saw is fixed.
There are many ways to resolve a bug. FogBUGZ allows you to resolve a bug as fixed, won't fix, postponed, not repro, duplicate, or by design.
Not Repro means that nobody could ever reproduce the bug. Programmers often use this when the bug report is missing the repro steps.
You'll want to keep careful track of versions. Every build of the software that you give to testers should have a build ID number so that the poor tester doesn't have to retest the bug on a version of the software where it wasn't even supposed to be fixed.
If you're a programmer, and you're having trouble getting testers to use the bug database, just don't accept bug reports by any other method. If your testers are used to sending you email with bug reports, just bounce the emails back to them with a brief message: "please put this in the bug database. I can't keep track of emails."
If you're a tester, and you're having trouble getting programmers to use the bug database, just don't tell them about bugs - put them in the database and let the database email them.
If you're a programmer, and only some of your colleagues use the bug database, just start assigning them bugs in the database. Eventually they'll get the hint.
If you're a manager, and nobody seems to be using the bug database that you installed at great expense, start assigning new features to people using bugs. A bug database is also a great "unimplemented feature" database, too.
Avoid the temptation to add new fields to the bug database. Every month or so, somebody will come up with a great idea for a new field to put in the database. You get all kinds of clever ideas, for example, keeping track of the file where the bug was found; keeping track of what % of the time the bug is reproducible; keeping track of how many times the bug occurred; keeping track of which exact versions of which DLLs were installed on the machine where the bug happened. It's very important not to give in to these ideas. If you do, your new bug entry screen will end up with a thousand fields that you need to supply, and nobody will want to input bug reports any more. For the bug database to work, everybody needs to use it, and if entering bugs "formally" is too much work, people will go around the bug database.
I recommend adding small comments to the main pieces of codes and using debug messages. You can also implement a debug mode which can be a global variable. If that mode is enabled the variables values will be shown in the critical places of the application. This should help tracking the variables and seing when the problem occurs. (this method can be useful when the development environment does not have a 'watch')
Yes this is true that the authorities can close a bug but ideally the bug should be fixed by the person who has opened it. Its by the rule and exceptions are always there.
1) Before logging the defect in the defect-tracking tool make sure the same or same kind of the defect is raised before. If it raised before just add your observation to the defect.
2) Make sure that all the stakeholders of the defects are involved in the address list of the defect-tracking tool. Address list should be customized on the need basis
3) Put the correct severity and priority for the defect raised
4) Grab the attention of the developers by Inform through the mails or by calls if defect raised is of high severity and high priority (show stopper kind)
5) The person who raised the defect should take the ownership of the defect. Tracked until the closure by the person who raised.
6) Log the defect how much ever the small issue.
7) Defect should include steps to reproduce. Once you wrote the steps to reproduce make sure that you can reproduce yourself using the same steps.
Tester should be able to reproduce the bug bug description should be understadable to everyone we should assign proper priority & severity to the reported bug we should attach proper screen shots to the reported report always status of the bug should be uptodate. All the bugs information should exists in the bug tracking tool.
