Bug Reporting Template

Squashing bugs is a huge undertaking, but it’s often pushed down the priority list to meet deadlines for new features or address urgent fires. When bugs aren’t reported properly — or worse, go unnoticed — they quietly erode the user experience and damage their trust over time. But capturing those bugs quickly and efficiently isn’t nearly as difficult as you think. There’s a better way.

Slack’s bug reporting template gives you everything you need to accurately capture bug reports, centralize bug reporting, and automate tracking status updates. Easily create a unified platform for your team to quickly submit, log, and triage incoming bugs, saving everyone time and making next steps as clear as possible. No more scrambling to understand new issues. Just clear and concise bug reports your team can use to resolve problems faster.

What is a bug reporting template?

Bug reporting templates are the centralized location where your team can share bug reports and collaborate on finding a fix. Bug reporting templates create a framework for documenting known software issues, whether the problem comes from users or your QA team, and ensuring that everyone involved in the process understands precisely how the team needs to move forward for each new issue.

This standardized template creates workflow automation for capturing information quickly and efficiently, letting your team tackle the work together without having to waste time figuring out the best way to communicate new issues on the fly.

What are the benefits of using Slack’s software bug report template?

Slack’s software bug report template centralizes bug management, streamlining the submission, triage, and tracking of all incoming software issues in any given environment. It provides your team with a clear framework for collaborative resolution.

Centralized bug management

A centralized solution for managing internal bug reports efficiently, this template is designed to streamline the process of discussing and triaging bugs within your team, ensuring that issues are addressed promptly and effectively. By consolidating all bug-related communication in one place, this template enhances team coordination and improves the speed and quality of your software development cycle. It ensures that bugs are quickly identified, tracked, and resolved, leading to a more reliable and stable product.

Streamlined bug reporting

This template simplifies the process of reporting new issues. Team members can easily log and track bugs as they encounter them without disrupting their flow of work. This feature ensures that every bug is captured in real time, helping to capture expected results, add necessary details, and log actual outcomes.

Streamlining bug reporting not only saves time but also encourages team members to report issues promptly with a clear bug description and accurate details, such as steps to reproduce, severity level, and screenshots. A good bug report not only speeds up the resolution process, but also leads to quicker bug fixes and a more reliable and stable product.

Automated bug tracking

Our bug tracking template includes an automated bugs tracker list, where new bugs are added as soon as they are reported. This dynamic list serves as a live inventory of current issues, allowing team members to see what’s been reported, track progress on resolutions, and prioritize tasks effectively. 

This template also includes an automatic weekly bugs summary and status change alerts to prevent bugs from slipping through the cracks, ensuring every issue receives the attention it needs. This feature helps teams understand the impact of each bug, prioritize fixes effectively, and maintain high standards of quality assurance.

Guided bug submission

To assist team members in reporting bugs accurately and in a standardized way, the template features a “how to submit a bug” canvas. This instructional guide provides clear, step-by-step instructions on what information to include when reporting a bug, such as screenshots, steps to reproduce, and severity levels. By educating team members on how to submit detailed, useful bug reports, the guide helps improve the quality of submissions, facilitating faster and more effective bug resolution.

How to get started with your bug tracking report template

Building a bug-tracking report template is easy when you know what to include. Just think about the kind of information your team needs to understand incoming software issues and prioritize them based on user impact. Documenting this for your team creates a framework for tackling new bugs as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Title and description

The first thing your bug template report needs is a title that captures the issue as concisely as possible. From there, you’ll need a quick summary of who reported the bug and how it impacts the user experience. A good title and description give whoever picks up the ticket a clear understanding of the work they need to do.

Steps to reproduce

Whenever you report a bug, your team must know what steps to take to reproduce the issue. Number each step required to reproduce the bug, for example:

1. Open the application
2. Select the image editor feature
3. Try importing a PNG file over 5MB
4. The editor times freezes, and the app crashes
5. The user loses their work and has to restart the app

Clearly outlining these steps ensures that you can accurately document the behavior that caused the bug and the ways it doesn’t work as intended.

Expected result 

This is your desired outcome. When your team built the feature or functionality, how was it supposed to function? Understanding the desired behavior sets a baseline your team can use to measure the bug’s impact on the overall user experience.

Actual result

This is the bug behavior or the undesirable outcome. Actual results are one of the most essential additions to your bug report. It communicates how your software isn’t working as intended. Make sure your team knows they must be as specific as possible with their description. Instead of writing something like, “The image upload doesn’t work,” write “Images over 5MB crash the image uploader without an error message.” More clarity leads to a faster resolution.

Severity/priority

If bugs aren’t prioritized correctly, it can really bog down your team and make it difficult for them to know where they should start. Include an option in your bug submission form for severity or priority so you can easily triage your work based on what’s important. For example:

• Critical: An issue that impacts a vital aspect of your software and stops people from getting value from it.
• Medium: An issue that directly affects the user experience in a negative way.
• Low: Any other issues that don’t have a direct impact on the usability of your software.

To make setting priorities easy, give your team an overview of what each level means and how they can determine where to place a new bug.

Review process

You need a second pair of eyes on every bug report created. This ensures that the information provided by whoever submitted the report is comprehensive enough for another team member to take action immediately. If it is, great. If it isn’t, the reviewer can ask clarifying questions or request additional proof to update the bug report accordingly.

Bug reporting best practices

Now that you understand what needs to be included in your bug report, let’s look at some best practices that can really level up your team’s ability to collaborate effectively.

Write clear and concise reporting instructions

With Slack’s bug reporting template, you have space to document and define bug reporting instructions for your team. The reporting instructions section is where you’ll include the information someone will need in order to fill out an effective bug report. Remember to include all the information we shared with you earlier. Sharing the information in this format standardizes the process for your team and cuts down on potential mistakes due to inconsistent reporting.

Ensure you’re getting correct information with a bug submission form

Your bug submission form is one of the most important parts of a bug reporting and tracking template. This form captures information about incoming issues, so you need to lay out all the required information to categorize and prioritize new bugs for anyone filling out the form.

Make it clear that every bug report needs a title, description, steps to reproduce the bug, actual and expected results, and priority. That way, the person submitting the information, whether they’re a newbie or a seasoned developer, can submit an excellent report every time.

Level up your project management with a bug tracker

Slack’s built-in bug tracker gives you the ability to assign and track tasks directly within your bug reporting template. Tracking bugs this way gives everyone on your team visibility into all current issues, their priority, and who’s responsible for resolving them. And it automates parts of the bug tracking process, bypassing the potential for errors in manual reporting.

Creating a unified platform for project management also cuts down on the time it takes to share updates, meaning your developers have more time to focus on squashing the bugs. 

Stay in the loop with individual issues using bug status change alerts

High-priority bugs need to be resolved as fast as possible. Slack’s bug reporting templates let you create alerts for when the status changes on any bug in your bug tracker. This streamlines communications, giving everyone involved an update whenever a status changes. When everyone’s kept in the loop, you no longer need to reach out to individuals directly.

Track team progress with a weekly bug summary report

Slack’s bug report format helps you maintain a granular view of all current bugs in your software at any given time. But sometimes, it’s important to step back and review your bug reporting on a broader level as well.

Automated weekly bug reports give stakeholders in your team the visibility they need to track overall team progress and speed so you never have to worry about losing track of unresolved bugs when things get busy.

Transform your bug tracking process with Slack’s template

Say goodbye to scattered reports and overlooked issues. Our bug tracking report template empowers your team to capture, prioritize, and resolve bugs faster — keeping your product polished and your users happy. Ready to streamline your workflow and elevate your software quality? Try our bug submission template today and see the difference it makes for your team.