The Ideal Mobile App Bug Report Template

When you’re testing your mobile app or even if it’s in production and you want your users to submit feedback, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a user feedback or bug report template. Having a bug report template allows you to maintain a standardized format for user feedback and bug reports submitted by your mobile app users or testers instead of having them submitted in random haphazard forms. This way you can easily go through them, manage them, or even filter through them for important data.

A bug report template forms the base on which your user feedback system will operate. Here, we’ve gathered all the things you need to consider when creating a bug report template.

Mobile App Bug Report Template

Bug Title

Each bug submitted needs to have a unique identifier that allows you to easily refer to it. This could be the Bug Title, which will differ from one issue to another and is usually defined by the tester or person reporting the bug.

Personal Information

It is important that each bug report is associated with the person who reported it. This is extremely important for multiple reasons, especially if the bug report isn’t clear to the developer or if he had other questions or inquiries for the person who submitted the report.

Again, using a bug reporting tool can accomplish this automatically by easily identifying your users. However, if you’re doing this manually, you’ll need the user to submit their information. It doesn’t have to be super detailed and you just need to capture the important information for efficiency.

• Name of the person reporting the bug

• Bug report submission date

• Team/Title

If your users or testers are not part of your team, then you might want to add other fields they need to fill as a means to reach them if needed.

• E-mail address

• Phone number

Bug/Feedback

An important way to classify any submitted report is to have the user identify whether it’s a:

• Bug: An issue, error, problem, mistake, or crash that the user unexpectedly faced using the mobile app.

• Feedback: A general comment, suggested change, or feature request that you believe would improve the mobile app or the user experience.

Categorizing your reports can help you triage your reports and prioritize them based on whether it’s a bug that needs to be fixed asap or feedback that you can consider and add to your backlog or product roadmap to work on later on.

Bug Description

A bug report description should be simple, to the point, and briefly explain the bug or the problem that occurred. This allows the developers to quickly identify the bug’s urgency and make a decision to either delve more into it straight away or fix it later based on priority.

Extended Bug Report

The extended bug report basically consists of three fields: steps to reproduce, actual results, and expected results. This is where your QA team, beta testers, or users can dive more into the details about what happened that led to the bug and explain what the expected results were and what the outcome eventually was.

In terms of the repro steps, users should describe the step by step flow that led them to face the reported bug. This should be an actual list of anything and everything they clicked on, navigated to, or any other action they performed in the mobile app that could have caused the problem. This helps the developers to be able to retrace the steps to reproduce the bug, see where the actual problem was along the way, and fix it accordingly.

App/Build Version

You need to mention the app or the build version on which the problem occurred so that the developers can refer back to it.

Environment Details

Certain issues might occur due to external circumstances like the device, OS, OS version, locale, memory usage, battery percentage, network, and more. So it’s useful to provide all of the details you can to the developer to help them get to the issue faster and more efficiently.

This is another reason why using a bug reporting tool is perfect as it automatically captures user steps, network logs, and all device details to help you know exactly why a bug happened so you can spend your time fixing rather than debugging.

Level of Severity

Not all bugs are created equally, and while some might cause minor issues with your mobile apps that go unnoticed, others can actually cost your business a lot of money. Assigning a level of severity to a bug report is important to give you an idea of the actual impact of the bugs on your mobile app.

You can allow your users to assign the level of severity when submitting the bug report based on their estimate or have a project manager do it.

Levels of severity include:

• Blocker

• Critical

• Major

• Minor

• Trivial

Priority

Priorities are assigned to the bugs to determine the order in which the bugs are to be fixed by the developers. This is usually done by project managers or product owners and it’s usually assigned based on the severity of the bugs. However, this is not always the case, as some managers may choose to have some of the minor issues that wouldn’t take much time fixed while working on a major issue that would take longer.

Categories of priority include:

• High

• Medium

• Low

Bug Status

Each bug report needs to have a status to determine where it’s at in the pipeline. This helps keeps track of your quality assurance process, especially when you have a lot of feedback, as some issues can be reopened multiple times until they’re fixed.

Bug statuses include:

• New

• Assigned

• Open

• Fixed

• Test

• Verified

• Closed

• Reopen

• Duplicate

• Deferred

• Rejected

• Can’t Be Fixed

• Not Reproducible

• Need More Information

Attachments

You should leave space for the users to submit any attachments that go along with the bug report, including any screenshots for UI bugs or screen recordings to illustrate the user flow. It can be very valuable for the developers to actually see the issue to be able to solve it.

How can Instabug help?

Instabug is the top beta testing tool for bug reporting and user feedback in mobile apps. It provides the most useful metadata on the market, exceptional customer support, and an in-app communication channel to chat with your beta testers.

• Integrations: Jira, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Zendesk, and more.
• Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $41 per month.

Bug and Crash Reporting

With each report, you automatically receive comprehensive data to help fix issues faster, including steps to reproduce errors, network request and console logs, and environment details. For bug reporting, your beta testers can also send attachments to provide further context.

In-App Surveys and Feature Request Management

Collect user feedback from your beta testers right inside your app to minimize interruptions and boost participation rates. Get powerful insights to enhance your product roadmap with surveys that you can target to specific tester segments and feature request voting to understand user pain points and desires.

App Performance Monitoring

Go beyond bugs and crashes and understand exactly how your app is performing. Identify slow app launches, UI hangs, client-side network latency, and more to help you deliver a world-class experience to your users.

Conclusion

Using a bug report template is key for developers to be able to locate bugs and fix them efficiently, but it is also crucial that you inform your testers about what you look for in your bug report so that they can submit the information developers need in order to reproduce and fix the bug. It is also highly recommended that you use a bug reporting tool, which will save you and your testers a lot of time and effort, as well as make the process easier, encouraging testers to participate more and provide valuable feedback.