The Bug Reporting plays a vital role to every Tester. He/She needs to prepare a good informative, detailed, technical yet simple Bug Reports on his/her day-to-day Testing activities. A Bug Report is the second most important work after discovering defects. It is the document in which all the steps taken to reproduce the issue are mentioned in detail. It also contains all other informations such as; Product Name, Product Version, Operating System, Web Browser, etc.
The Bug Report can be done by using various medias. It can be simply entered into on a Excel worksheet, or can be drafted on a text editor, or can be emailed to the respective Developement Team, or canbe logged into a BTS (Bug Tracking System). The Screenshots & videos are used in the Bug Report in order to make it stronger, larger, and simpler. In fact, the Screenshots & videos helps to indetify, locate, & resolve the issue so quickly even with or without much bug description. A Tester is the one who gives his/her best to make/capture the Screenshots & videos, in order to make understand the development team easily.
Generally, we the Windows Users do use the 'PrtSc' key from the keyboard to take screenshoots. Also there are few add-ons & small tools available where we can take the screenshots. Likewise, there are many paid and free tools available for capturing the issues as the Video formats. I'm not going to tell you all those tools here. I'm gonna discuss about a small utility tool available in Windows 7 in-built for captering the whole process of issue detection. The tool name is Problem Steps Recorder aka 'PSR'. This is a simple tool like any other record & play Testing tool. It can be accessed by typing PSR on the Start Menu search box or Run Window.
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The PSR captures screenshots of every step taken in windows. Also it keeps track of date & time and describes in plain English. The User can do Start Recording, Stop Recording, even he/she can add the appropriate Comments on a particular Step during recording. On Stopping the Recording, it asked to save the file. The saving of recorded file can also be configured autometically by using Settings.
The captered screenshots gets saved with the .zip extension and the recorded steps saved in a .mhtml file. It can be viewed by a simple web browser. It's available on Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 only. Hope, I narrated well on how to use this utility tool. This tool is not exclusively made for we Testers but it can be helpful for day-to-day work.