Exploratory testing – a rookie’s thoughts (part 2)

Q: How about reporting issues? How did you go about logging bugs while pair testing?
A: Logging the bugs we found took longer than expected. This means, that we found something, determined that it was a bug, investigated its cause, then spent too much time logging the said bug (even if we agreed on the cause and the effect of the bug, as well as on the steps to reproduce it); I guess you could say we didn’t agree on what information to include in the report, what order was the most appropriate, and what was relevant as far as that particular bug was concerned.
I don’t have a concrete example for this, but I seem to recall logging a tricky bug that overlapped with another one and my testing partner suggested adding information from one bug in the other’s report, while it was clear – to me at least – that the piece of information they wanted to add was not relevant to the bug report at hand. I realize this is quite biased, seeing that this is only my side of the story I suppose….
Bug reporting may have been slow because when I write things down, I constantly revise it until it starts to resemble a coherent thought (this fails at times though… miserably even). Or it may have been because my level of English was different than that of my testing partner. It was probably a little bit of both. 🙂
Or maybe this is a personal thing, I don’t know; I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to putting my words on digital paper and I consider committing anything to words to be mainly a solitary activity, after all it’s your ideas on digital paper. Besides, two people can have very different ways of writing the same thing down, even if the main idea is identical. So you would have a train of thought and your partner would have a different one, and oftentimes they would rather collide instead of combining into a cohesive bug report.
All in all, my conclusion is that having someone next to you can help a lot during testing, while it could be a hindrance when logging bugs.

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