Successful testers avoid overemphasis on functional correctness, and focus on the ways in which people might obtain value from a program — or have that value threatened. Being a tester, reporting bugs clearly in order to alert a developer is just as important as verifying functional correctness. Testers should possess good documentation skills in addition to their testing capabilities. There are several instances that I know of where a major bug was improperly documented and reported to the developer.

My post offers a clear example that demonstrates the importance of documenting bugs properly, which is taken from one of our own testing instances. We needed to perform functional testing on a new feature that had been introduced for a media site. After completing functional testing, we were supposed to perform a regression testing on the media site since release was scheduled on the same day.