Any software or SaaS-based company knows how critical software tests are in maintaining product quality. These tests help the product team identify bugs early on and fix them before they create trouble for the customers.
Test reports are an important part of software testing.
Without these reports, it will be difficult to convey the software test results to the relevant stakeholders in an efficient manner. Many companies have invested a good portion of their testing budget to create reports of software testing using automation.
Let’s find out what these testing reports are and how you can write one.
What are Test Reports?
A test report for software testing is a clear and concise summary of the tests you or your team have put the software through. Using these reports, the relevant stakeholders can understand how each test went and identify defects in the software performance.
It shows the test outcomes and provides valuable information on the application’s progress, readiness, and quality throughout the testing cycle.
These days, you can easily report software testing using automation.
However, even if you use a powerful and highly accurate test automation reporting tool, the test report they generate must have the following features:
- Detailed Information: Your reports should have detailed information on all the testing activities. However, these details should be enough to help the stakeholders clearly understand the tests and their outcomes.
- Format: You need to format the reports using standard templates. It will help relevant team members review it quickly and get to the crux of the matter.
- Clarity: The information you add to the report must be clear and concise without reflecting any ambiguity.
- Specifications: Your report must reflect the test result specifications concisely. They must be to the point, free of any verbosity.
How to Develop a Test Report for Software Testing?
You need to go through multiple steps to create an insightful and comprehensive test report. That’s true even if you report software testing using automation tools.
To help you understand the report creation process, let’s say that the software team of an online travel company is developing the ABC application.
This application is supposed to help customers book bus, rail, or airplane tickets, make hotel reservations, and make payments for holiday packages.
Now, we will be creating a test report for this travel agency.
Step 1: Define the Purpose of the Report
First, you need to write a brief description of the document’s purpose. For our example, let’s say the purpose is as follows:
“This report captures the activities performed as a part of testing the ABC online travel booking application.”
Step 2: Gather Data
Without the ability to gather accurate data, there would be no meaning in writing a test report. You need to ensure that the testing process can collect all the relevant information.
The data may include test execution results, shortcomings of the application, test environment details, and other relevant metrics.
You can report software testing using suitable automation tools to gather these data sets smoothly.
Step 3: Define a Testing Scope
You and your team must define the testing scopes for the application. You need to specify the areas that will be within your testing scope, the modules that will be out of your scope, as well as the areas that will remain untested for various reasons.
For our example of the ABC online travel application, let’s say the scopes are defined as below:
- In-scope: The following areas will be within the scope of the testing:
- User Registration
- Confirmation of the registered users
- Ticket bookings
- Booking of accommodations
- Payment
- Out of scope: Areas that will be tested but will not be included in the current report.
- Concurrency
- Multi-tenant User Testing
- Modules that are not tested: The user registration page that has mixed value field cases.
Step 4: Capture the Relevant Metrics
With relevant test metrics, you and the other stakeholders can understand the status of the cases, the test execution results, functional defects, and more. You can also use charts and graphs for better visual representation of the type of defects.
In any case, the test reports must include the following metrics at the very least:
- The number of planned test cases
- The number of executed test cases
- Total number of passed test cases
- Total number of failed test cases
- The number of defects your team identified during the test along with their status and severity
Step 5: Show the Executed Testing Type
The stakeholders need to know what tests have been performed on the application to make informed decisions. The report should show if the smoke, regression, and system integration tests have been performed on the product, as well as their results.
Step 6: Add the Test Environment and Tools Used
Your team must also include the test environment in which the activities were carried out. The test environment details can be captured in a table format to make it easy to understand. It must have the following details:
- Application URL
- Database
- The names of the tools your team used during the testing. It can be a tool for bug management or an app used to report software testing using automation.
Step 7: Add What You Learned During the Test
Your team should always include the problems that showed up during the software testing and the solutions you used to get rid of them. This data will greatly help the testing team during the upcoming tests.
The chart or the table must contain:
- The issue number
- Details of the issue
- The solutions your team used to fix the issue
Step 8: Suggestions and Recommendations
Does your team have any suggestions for the next testing team? If your answer is yes, don’t forget to mention them in your report. It might not look that big of a deal. But they can help the other teams avoid common pitfalls and unnecessary troubles during their testing cycle.
Step 9: Exit Criteria
Exit criteria can be defined as conditions that need to be fulfilled for the software test to be marked as complete. The testing team can include the following conditions as exit criteria:
- All the pre-determined test cases have been successfully executed.
- Your team has closed all critical problems.
- Your team has already devised plans to deal with the open issues that will be addressed in the next testing cycle.
Step 10: Sign Off
This is the last step where your team can show the green light for the application to go live as long as the exit criteria are fulfilled. If that’s not the case, the testing team must highlight the relevant concerns. Any further decisions will be left in the hands of the senior management.
Bonus Step: Automate Test Reports
The testing team can also create a test report of software testing using automation tools. All you need to do is integrate those applications with the test management systems.
These apps will automatically capture the test data and create insightful reports after the integration is complete without much human intervention.
Conclusion
The test reports show how the testing team evaluates an application. The stakeholders can analyze the report to understand the current status of the software and identify its glaring issues.
So, the product team can eliminate unnecessary functions, perform proper bug fixes, and launch the application to the market quickly.
