Add a list with Rejection Reasons to your bugs.

A PractiTest customer was telling me about a problem they have with people not writing down their reasons when rejecting a bug, or writing unclear explanations in the Description or Comments fields.

I know exactly what she meant…  I also hate this issue plus the fact that since the data is in Free Text it is very difficult to track the reasons and keep statistics (in case you believe like I do in tracking this behaviour as part of an on-going improvement policy).

My solution is simple: I create a customized field called Reject Reason with the acceptable values for rejecting bugs in the project.  Usually these values are: Not a Bug, Not Clear, Unable to Reproduce, and Duplicate.

I find that by providing a list instead of asking my users to write down their explanation in free text they are more willing to comply.

Also since I have this as a structured list, PractiTest provides me automatically with statistics to keep track of my rejections and make corrections if needed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 9:44 am and is filed under Best Practices, Bug Reporting, Metrics & Statistics, On-Going Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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