Testing notes

Testing notes are an essential part of how I do software testing, if you don’t use them no shade from me, but I need my notes!

Over the years, I’ve taken notes in very different ways, and using different tools. How I take exploratory testing notes now, differs widely to how I took notes while I was mostly using test cases, and each of those evolved over time.

I’m interested to know, where do you keep your notes? Do you add comments to tickets? Scribble on paper?

My preference is to have test notes pages in confluence, and edit them as I go, and then if needed I copy details into other tools or provide links. You can even do a neat trick where confluence pages are embedded into Jira tickets.

What do I like about my method? Simply

• Confluence works well with multiple people editing a document at once, great for ensemble testing!
• It has enough formatting and embedding of media options to be useful
• Using templates and macros it’s a low barrier to creating a new page, so I can jump into making notes quickly
• It’s visible to others very quickly without me needing to explicitly share it, so I’m doing everything visibly

How do you take your notes, and why?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash