Say it clearly but briefly. First, eliminate unnecessary wordiness.Second, don’t add in extraneous information. It is important that you include all relevant information, but make sure that the information is relevant. In situations where it is unclear how to reproduce the problem or the understanding of the problem is vague for whatever reason you will probably need to capture more information. Keep in mind that irrelevant information can be just as problematic as too little relevant information.
| Condense Example | Defect Remark |
| Don’t: Suffers from TMI (Too Much Information), most of which is not helpful. | I was setting up a test whose real intent was to detect memory errors. In the process I noticed a new GUI field that I was not familiar with. I decided to exercise the new field. I tried many boundary and error conditions that worked just fine. Finally, I cleared the field of any data and attempted to advance to the next screen, then the program abended. Several retries revealed that anytime there is not any data for the "product description" field you cannot advance to the next screen or even exit or cancel without abending. |
| Do: | The "exit", "next", and "cancel" functions for the "Product Information" screen abends when the "product description" field is empty or blank. |
