School of Information Systems

Test Summary Reports Tutorial: Learn with Example & Template

28 Feb 2022

Test Report

Test Report is a document which contains a summary of all test activities and final test results of a testing project. Test report is an assessment of how well the Testing is performed. Based on the test report, stakeholders can evaluate the quality of the tested product and make a decision on the software release.

For example, if the test report informs that there are many defects remaining in the product, stakeholders can delay the release until all the defects are fixed.

Test Report Example

Why Test Report?

The following scenario will show you why we do need the Test Report

Do you know the root cause of this problem? Why does the website still has defects even when your Team has already tested it?

The problem is you ignored the reporting & evaluation phase in Test Management. The boss has no information to evaluate the quality of this website. They just trusted what you said and released the website without knowing its testing performance.

The typical benefits of a test report include:

How to make a good Test Report?

To answer this, you must know –

What does a test report contain?

Project Information

All information of the project such as the project name, product name, and version should be described in the test report. For example, the information of Guru99Bank project will be as follows

Test Objective

As mentioned in Test Planning tutorial, Test Report should include the objective of each round of testing, such as Unit Test, Performance Test, System Test …Etc.

Test Summary

This section includes the summary of testing activity in general. Information detailed here includes

  • The number of test cases executed
  • The numbers of test cases pass
  • The numbers of test cases fail
  • Pass percentage
  • Fail percentage
  • Comments

This information should be displayed visually by using color indicator, graph, and highlighted table.

Take a look at Test Report of the website Guru99 Bank to know more detail about Test report

Defect

One of the most important information in Test Report is defect. The report should contain following information

  • Total number of bugs
  • Status of bugs (open, closed, responding)
  • Number of bugs open, resolved, closed
  • Breakdown by severity and priority

Like test summary, you can include some simple metrics like Defect density, % of fixed defects.

The project team sent you the Defect information as following

  • Defect density is 20 defects/1000 lines of code average
  • 90% defects fixed in total
  • The detail of the bugs are described in this Defect tracker here

You can represent the data as following graph

Tips to write a good test report

Test report is a communication tool between the Test Manager and the stakeholder. Through the test report, the stakeholder can understand the project situation, the quality of product and other things.

The following scenario shows you why we need a good Test Report

You co-operate with outsourcing company, its tester after having performed Performance Testing of the website Guru99 Bank, sends you a test report like this

The information of that report is too abstract. It does not have any detailed information. The stakeholder who will read it might be slightly puzzled when they get it. They might ask or have following sets of questions: –

  • Why did they not execute 30 TCs that remains
  • What are these failed Test Cases
  • Doesn’t have any bugs description

To solve that problem, a good Test Report should be:

  • Detail: You should provide a detailed description of the testing activity, show which testing you have performed. Do not put the abstract information into the report, because the reader will not understand what you said.
  • Clear: All information in the test report should be short and clearly understandable.
  • Standard: The Test Report should follow the standard template. It is easy for stakeholder to review and ensure the consistency between test reports in many projects.
  • Specific: Do not write an essay about the project activity. Describe and summarize the test result specification and focus on the main point.

For example, to correct the above Test Report, the tester should provide more information such as:

  • Project information
  • Test cycle: (System Test, Integration Test…etc.)
  • Which functions have already tested (% TCs executed, % TCs passed or fail…)
  • Defect report (Defect description, Priority or status…)

https://www.guru99.com/how-test-reports-predict-the-success-of-your-testing-project.html

Joni Suhartono