6.2. Poor Quality reports: Why grammar matters

• Grammar

Going beyond the correct use of tech vocabulary we, the moderators, sometimes find ourselves clashing with a very frequent problem: testers who do not speak English as their first language tend to make lots of grammatical mistakes. We do not mean to judge too much, nor do we expect each of our testers to speak the language at a native level. But it is sometimes hard to read a text that has many mistakes.

Most times we intervene ourselves and correct a lot of the simple spelling errors in order to make the report look as presentable as possible, and we always accept reports with only small or unimportant errors. We want to give our testers the best chance for them to succeed so we try to not be too harsh in our evaluation.

That being said, there will be times when there are so many errors that the bug report needs to be completely rewritten or worse: rejected as a poor-quality report.

In order to avoid this situation, we strongly urge you to use the free browser add-on ‘Grammarly’.

This add-on is a great way to double-check your text for any grammatical or spelling errors. It’s not perfect but then again few things are. We are in no way associated with this tool directly but we ourselves use it quite often so we think you might want to give it a chance. 

Incorrect descriptions and/or title

This decision is often easy to make for any moderator. The description of a bug should always match the content of the bug.

Any issue that does not simply and correctly explain what it is about will find itself rejected.

Examples:

• Wrong title: “Localisation bug”
• Correct title: “The name of the section is improperly translated”

• Wrong title: ”app crashes”
• Correct title: “The app crashes when the user tries to upload a profile picture”

• Wrong description: ”When I go to setting, the screen stops”
• Correct description: “When the user accesses the Settings screen, the app freezes”

• Wrong description: ”When I play the game loads and the spinner doesn’t stop”
• Correct description: “When the user enters the gameplay of any map, he will notice that an infinite loading animation is triggered”

Incorrect attachments + Misleading or incomplete steps

We have discussed these two in great detail and incorrect use of any or both can easily get you a ‘Poor Quality’ resolution.