Writing a Bug Report as a Video Game Tester

Video game testing is about a lot more than just playing new games before they are released. In fact, a good chunk of the job involves writing and reading technical reports that clearly outline the bugs in the game. Specifically, you must be able to clearly identify a problem, outline how it occurred, and under what circumstances you were able to make it reappear.

When You’ll Write Reports

Bug reports are written throughout the process, usually between builds when you are completing any given test case. While you must follow the walkthrough or checklist provided in a test case, if you do find a bug, you will stop your progress and focus heavily on the bug and what causes it. This might occur in the alpha, beta, or QA stage and should be treated with priority in all three cases.

Writing Your Bug Report

Just finding a bug in the game is not enough. You must be able to identify how the bug occurred, what circumstances are needed to recreate the bug, and most importantly, what the bug does to the game. Programmers are working with millions of lines of code and need to know where the bug is mostly likely to have an impact. The more data they have, and the easier that data is to interpret, the faster they can pinpoint and fix the bug.

The bug report will also be read by a lot of people before it ends up in the bug database, so it’s vital that you are clear in a way that can be understood not only by the programmer, but by production leads and directors as well.

Part one of a bug report will describe the bug. It might be that a wall disappears when you put on a certain tunic in a game. If this happens, the bug report would start with “northwest wall of city in Big City disappears when putting on Bright Tunic.”

The second part of your report, however, is the most important. It needs to be concise and to the point – no adjectives or descriptions beyond the exact actions you took to create the bug. This should be written as a numbered list that lays out exactly what happens from start to finish in generating that bug.

You may also be expected to learn the IBM ODC system to classify bugs. This not only helps to prioritize the bugs as they arrive, but to pinpoint where in the code they appear. As a tester, programming skills can be very handy for this exact reason.

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