The document provides guidance on writing effective bug reports, including knowing your audience, choosing a clear and descriptive title, providing unambiguous steps to reproduce the bug, and explaining the actual effect of the bug rather than just the symptoms. It recommends including details like the area and build number affected, severity and priority of the bug, steps to reproduce, expected result, and screenshots if applicable. The sample bug report template covers all these recommended elements for clearly documenting a software bug.

1. Writing Effective
Bug Reports

2. 1: Know Your Audience(s)

3. first audience: the person who
must fix the bug

4. second audience: the person or
group who decides

5. 2: Choose a Good Title

6. Examples:
- Program crashes when you choose exit from the file
menu just after the database has become unavailable
and you were saving changes to a record
- Program crashes
- Problem when database offline
- Crash on exit after timeout

7. 3: Write
Clear, Unambiguous Steps

8. Step:-
1. Launch the client 1. Launch the client
2. Call up a record 2. Query the database for
3. Change the record but new entries
don’t save your changes yet 3. Launch a browser
4. Take the database server 4. Read the news on
offline yahoo.com
5. Attempt to save the record 5. Quit the browser
6. Receive a timeout error 6. Choose an entry
7. Exit the client 7. Change the category from
Result: Crash “vegetable” to “fruit”
8. Take the database offline
9. Attempt to save the record
10. Receive a timeout error
11. Exit the client
Result: Crash

9. 4: Explain the Effect
of the Bug, Not Just the
Symptoms

10. Examples:
1. A report that “an annoying dialog prevents you from
closing application”
2. A report that “the application hangs on exit”

11. Defect Report Templete:-
Bug Name: Application crash on clicking the SAVE button while creating a new user.
Area Path: USERS menu > New Users
Build Number: Version Number 5.0.1
Severity: HIGH (High/Medium/Low)
Priority: HIGH (High/Medium/Low)
Assigned to: Developer-X
Reported By: Your Name
Reported On: Date
Status: New/Open/Active (Depends on the Tool you are using)
Environment: Windows 2003/SQL Server 2005
Description:
...
Steps To Reproduce:
1) ...
2) ...
Expected result: ...
(Attach ‘application crash’ screen shot.. IF any)