Tester Guide
How to Write a Bug Report
When you find a bug in ILIAS, you should always create a new bug report in our bugtracker Mantis. Only through this report, the developer learns about the issue and can fix it. Hence, it is important to create bug reports that are clear and comprehensible.
Hint for all official testers
Bugs that you encounter during our official testing phase always must be pushed to Mantis from TestRail. Instructions on how to do so can be found at the end of the page TestRail for Testers. Please also read the following remarks on how to create proper bug reports.
When creating bug reports, please take into consideration the following pointers:
1
Choose the correct project and category
For our testing phase, ILIAS core is the correct project. The categories are coherent with the name of our Test Suites, e.g. "File", "Test & Assessment", "Survey" and so on. In most cases, this is the correct category.+
When creating a bug report from TestRail, this (and the following) data can only be selected after clicking on the "Push" button. Please make sure that the CATEGORY is correct!
2
Add a helpful title
The text field "Summary" serves as a title for the bug in Mantis. Write a short summary of the issue in order to explain the issue and find it easily. As the issues are grouped by module, it’s not necessary to add information on the module here. Rather, explain what is happening - or not happening, depending on the issue.
When pushing a bug report from TestRail, this field will automatically contain the following text: "Failed test: NAME OF TEST CASE". This information can be changed or amended if required.
3
How did the error occur?
developer often needs to reproduce an issue on his system in order to solve it.
- Explain what happened under Description.
- Add all necessary Steps to Reproduce the bug.
- When pushing a bug from TestRail, only the field Description is shown to you. There, you can enter the step of the test case where the bug happened. All bug reports pushed from TestRail include a link back to the original test case. This makes it easy for developers to reproduce the bug.
4
Where can the bug be seen or reproduced?
Please include a permalink to the object where the error happened.
- Do NOT copy the link from your browser navigation bar, but rather use the permalink that can be found in the footer of most pages in ILIAS. If you cannot find the link, include the name of the installation, object and tab.
- In TestRail, paste the link into the field "Permalink" in the test result.
5
Did ILIAS show an error message?
Error messages ("Whoops…") contain important information for our developers.
Please paste the error message and the stacktrace directly into the bug report.
6
Screenshots may help to understand the bug
Before writing a long report, think about whether it’s easier to explain your issue by adding a screenshot or video. This can be done by using the upload dialog in Mantis under Upload File.
- TestRail also allows you to add files and images to a report.
- You can either add files and screenshots to the test result and only keep them in TestRail OR add them in ther Push dialog. If you add them in the Push dialog, the screenshot will be pushed to Mantis, making it faster for the developer to see it.
7
Only report the same bug once!
If one and the same bug occurs at different stages of your testing process, please only report it ONCE. If you would like to add further information, open the existing bug report and add a note. Adding the same issue in several reports only slows down our maintainers and will result in delays.
- If an issue is preventing the test of more than one test case, set all affected test cases to "Blocked" and add the Mantis ID (#12345) under "Defects" in the test result. please also set the Mantis issue's Severity to "Block".
8
Save your bug report by clicking on the Submit (TestRail) or Submit Report (Mantis) button.