1. Black Box Software Testing 2004 Academic Edition
Part STATUS REPORTING by
Cem Kaner, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Software Engineering
Florida Institute of Technology
and
James Bach
Principal, Satisfice Inc.
Copyright (c) Cem Kaner & James Bach,
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
These notes are partially based on research that was supported by NSF Grant EIA ITR/SY+PE: "Improving the Education of Software Testers." Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

2. Bug Statistics are Only One Part of Status.
Project Status
Bug Statistics are Only One Part of Status.
Product status reporting is a long-term opportunity to communicate project information to a range of managers.
Put the key issues that you want people to see on page 1. People will flip a page to get to your statistics.

3. Project Status My weekly status reports look like this: A. Key Issues
Deliveries needed
What promises are still open
What documents are still needed
What functions are still uncoded
What tools are not yet working
Decisions needed
Bug fixes needed
Unexpected problems

4. Project Status B. Progress Against Plan Milestones Weekly goals
Percent complete
C. Bug Numbers
D. List of Bugs Not Fixed

5. Project Status I 3 weeks budgeted 1.5 weeks spent 60% complete II
10%
III
2 weeks
1.5 weeks
75%

6. Project Status Bug Numbers I. Bug Curves (weekly progress) Total open
New open
New closed/fixed
New closed/not-fixed
II. Weekly Table
Show this week and last week:
New bugs this week
New closed
New resolved (not yet fixed)
Total resolved

7. Project Status More Bug Numbers III. Another Weekly Table
Show last week and this week
Total open (x severity)
Total closed fixed (x severity)
Total closed not-fixed (x severity)
New open (x severity)
New closed fixed (x severity)
New closed not-fixed (x severity)

8. Project Status Priority Severity
Urgent
Important
Want to fix
Can defer
Awful
Bad
Pretty bad
Needs improvement
Minor
This is an example of the type of chart that you might create. This one can be used to flag a serious mismatch of opinion between testers (who assign severity) and programmers (who assign priority).