Chapter Six · The Case Files
Bugs: Finding, Reporting, Managing
The artifact chapter of the QA craft: what a bug actually is (and the two things it isn't), the report written so a developer can act in one read — FW-312 filed in full as the book's canonical example — the severity/priority split with the four corners interviews aim at, the lifecycle with the one gate QA owns outright, and the tracker where all of it lives, including the first-week cleanup that made you visible to the whole team in five days.
Bug reports are how a junior tester's competence gets judged in week one — before anyone has seen your test design, they've read your tickets. This chapter is that first impression, engineered: the routing judgment that keeps your reports from being argued with, the anatomy that deletes clarification ping-pong, the classification vocabulary every triage runs on, and the tracker discipline that compounds into reputation.
Four topics, one artifact trail. What is (and isn't) a bug — expected versus actual, the error→defect→failure chain, and one afternoon producing three different verdicts. The great bug report — FW-312 written field by field, then the rookie version and the two days of ping-pong it buys. Severity versus priority — the ER analogy, the 2×2 corners, the lifecycle, and disagreeing with Petra like a professional. And the tracker — triage, hygiene, filters, and the 82-ticket graveyard turned into twenty honest bugs.