Filling a ticket – Best practices

Search for duplicates

Before reporting a bug it is necessary to make sure that the bug does not already exist.

Pick a good summary

When we’re looking through lists of lots of issues, the summaries are essential in helping us to understand what an issue is about. This means that you should err in favour of putting too much information in the summary, rather than too little.

Some examples:

Bad: Space export doesn’t work
Good: Space export fails with NullPointerException when performed by the anonymous user

Bad: Administrator attachment control
Good: Allow configuration of maximum attachment sizes per space or per page

Set the Priority, Severity and Impact

You need to select the priority, severity and impact of this bug.

Set the “Fix version”, release version

Set the fix version once you know the test has passed and this is going in the next release, unless the release is based on what needs to go and not in what is ready.

Choose appropriate components

You need to select all the components that are related to the ticket. So, if you need to make changes on different components, this is the field that you need to specify them. It will be useful for the QA engineer to know what are the components affected and all the components that need to be tested.

Attach images/logs/videos/files

Often, especially when describing bugs, an image/log/video/file will help tremendously to explain the issue. If you are testing on mobile platform, try to attach tablet logs, videos and images. For web an image or a video should be fine and for the server platform you can attach the response and of course the steps to reproduce.

If you need to include a large piece of information in an issue, such as a stack trace, please do not put it in the Description field. Instead, add it as an attachment or a comment. (This makes it a lot easier to view and parse issues in most browsers.) I suggest you to use Jing to capture the images and video.

Link issues

If you know that a feature request or a bug is similar (but not identical) to an existing one, please link it using a link type of “relates to”. This will help to get a broader view of the problem, and may be able to solve not only one but two issues.

Write a detailed description

For all issues, please provide a description that can be understood by all in the community, not just yourself or other developers. Also, the description should allow the QA engineer to understand the implementation details of the story, down to the code level. This informs their decisions on risks, what testing needs to be added, and what testing is unnecessary. If you need to include some techno-babble, in addition to the plain language, for other developer types to understand the full details that’s fine.

First and foremost, put yourself in the place of someone else trying to solve the issue based on information in the Jira ticket alone. That means put as much information as you can into the ticket so that the next person can work the issue without having to follow up. Even if the ticket is for an issue you plan to work yourself, the more information provided, the better.

Every ticket must include:

• Detailed steps to test
• Given/When/Then following BDD
• Impacts, any integration with other components/features/functions. So, the tester will be able to think about edge cases
• Write which environment this needs to be tested (QA is the default if not specified). For mobile platform, we test directly from each component’s master branch, unless written in the ticket that the app was deployed on qa/dev environment.

Every bug must include:

• Detailed steps to reproduce
• Impacts, any integration with other components/features/functions. So, the tester will be able to think about edge cases
• What you expected to happen
• What happened instead
• Don’t forget to mention the environment you are testing. Make sure to include any information which might be relevant to the bug (eg. your screen resolution, browser, etc)

 

Don’t reopen issues that have been resolved and shipped

Don’t reopen resolved/closed issues once they have been shipped. If an issue similar to yours is marked as resolved, but you’re still experiencing a problem with it, create a new issue and provide a link to the original one. In the case of resolved bug-fix-issues, this will help to evaluate whether it is in fact the same problem, or actually a new issue with some of the same symptoms.

Testing a new story/feature

If you find a bug while testing a new feature:

• Create a Story bug and link it to the main ticket, remember to prioritize this bug. Also, put back the story ticket to in progress again
• Once the related Story bugs are fixed, the developer should move the story containing the bugs to Ready for QA, so any QA will be able to check if all bugs have been fixed and close the main story if there was not introduced new bugs.

Resources:

https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MGT/Sakai+Jira+Guidelines#SakaiJiraGuidelines-Community
https://wiki.collectionspace.org/display/collectionspace/Guidelines+for+Filing+a+JIRA+Bug+Report
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/using-jira-for-test-case-management-136872198.html
http://www.3pillarglobal.com/insights/manage-test-cases-bugs-using-jira
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/12/jira-qa-process/
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=30746287
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/JIRA+usage+guidelines