Reader, Srinivas Kadiyala, asked if I could share my bug report template.  A bug report template high level view might be boring so instead let’s examine bug report attributes individually.  Here’s Part 1.

Environment. 

Environment can be more or less useful depending on how one populates it.  Some testers equate Environment to the environment the bug was found in.  IMO, Environment is more useful when it equates to the lowest active version of our software the bug exists in.

If a skilled tester finds a bug in the QA environment, they will probably  next determine if it exists in the production environment.  If it does, IMO the bug report should have Environment = Production (even though the bug was originally found in QA). 

Now we have helped answer/trigger important questions for the team:

• Yikes!  Should we patch production ASAP?
• Are we going to break something in production if we deploy the QA build without fixing this bug? 
• How many bugs have escaped into production? We can query on this attribute to provide one of our most important measurements.