The best way to summarize QA reporting?

Question

We all know the problem, we have a reporting for the unit test, which is then usually sent as a warning "Build is not running" via email.

We have a reporting for automated acceptance test, we have an overview for manual test cases. And mostly separated, and still by email.

We have the annoying topic "please read your emails" or the status in Slack. Or in other derivatives.

But here are the questions:

How did you calm down?

How did you find a suitable structure to produce a summary reporting (best to make all developers, chefs, stakeholders happy?)

Is a summary in Confluence or a connection to a wiki enough? Who guarantees that the developers even read this evaluation accordingly?

Answer 1

As part of Test summary, collect all required information on the testing performed, This will help to prepare a sound Test summary report. Lessons learned can be explained in detail, which will convey the responsibility which was taken to solve these issues. also, this will be a reference for upcoming projects to avoid these. Similarly, mentioning the best practices will portray the efforts taken by the team apart from regular testing, which will also be treated as value addition, represent the status & data, last be not the least test summary report shall mention and explain the activities performed as part of the testing, to the recipients to understand better.

Answer 2

It is better to prepare different reports to different roles of your team.

• Developers usually value the steps to reproduce the defect and usually do not like duplicates. So if you have 1000 tests which are generated from 1000 parameters but the root-cause is the common for all, then pick the result of one such test for dev report.

• Managers usually do not care of what the defects are in details. They operate with severities. So for managers you should not provide the steps or exceptions. Just provide an aggregated view on the severity breakdown. Managers also like dynamics. So you can also include either the graph of values performance, or the change to the previous run

To make the reports more readable you can emphasize the important parts using text formatting. Also consider the way how you set the subject for your emails so that it is easy to apply rules so that one can configure convenient rule to put report the mail folder that seems suitable for each particular addressee. For example you can add component name or test suite name so that different runs would produce reports that would fall to different mail folders.

Answer 3

I assume that you mean "The best way to summarize test results in a report?"

1) Ask your people what kind of information they want to have 2) create report with that information

You are testing not because this is only thing what you can do, but because you collect information for your team, that they can make decision what to do next (fix bugs, stop release, investigate a case etc). If none can make decisions based on information you collected, then you are doing bad job.