Defects can be found in any software. However, finding a defect is only part of the story. What is really important is how to communicate this defect with the development team especially programming team.

Most of the companies use a tool for tracking defects. Once a defect is found, testing team will proceed and log it in the tool. However, sometimes it happens that the issue logged is actually not clear. This can be due to several reasons such as not well-written defect or lack of supporting snapshots.  The question is: what to do in this case?

The best thing to get any issue clear is communicate directly with the person who logged the issue. Face-to-face communication and discussion will help to get the defect clear in a very short period of time. Some companies fall is a big mistake which is to use the defect tracking tool for such communication. Therefore, the defect will more back and forth (an of course with an email notification with each movement).

I asked some programmers why would they use the defect tracking tool to communicate the defect. Some justified that by saying:

1. “I think this is good to keep full documentation of the issue for future purposes.”
2. “Also, it will help to know the mistake of the tester and why the issue is not clear!!!”

I would reply to the first point by asking the following two questions:

• Will this documentation be useful? Will some one refer to it in future?

Communication of defects in this way is really a waste of time. Therefore, are we going to invest our time to do things that we ONLY think they are good. Please note that I underlined the word “think” since that what the person said. Therefore, this makes me afraid that the guy is not sure whether what he said is correct or not.

For the second point of the justification which is about knowledge of tester mistake, this sounds like trying to capture testers mistakes which will not help in any way to solve the communication problem.

All the best.