What is Test Evaluation Report
By Sandra Felice, Community Contributor - January 12, 2023
Test Reports are an essential part of Software Testing in any project. Reporting how your testing has progressed and how it is going helps the stakeholders of the project to make key decisions regarding the project’s quality and its subsequent release. A Test Evaluation Report is one such report which determines whether an organization, software, or program is effectively carrying out the planned activities and is successfully achieving its stated objectives and anticipated results.
What is a Test Evaluation Report?
Test Evaluation Report (TER) is a document that contains a summary of all the testing activities, methods used for testing, and a summary of the final test results of a Software project. TER is prepared after the completion of testing and the Test Summary Report and provides all the necessary information regarding software testing to the developers and the key stakeholders. These stakeholders can then evaluate the quality of the tested product and make a decision on the software release.
Features of Test Evaluation Report
- Conducts analysis and assessment of Test Summary Report (TSR), source codes, test results, and the measures used for product testing.
- Enables objective evaluation and assessment of product quality.
- Consists of corresponding recommendations that may be required for the next testing efforts.
- Validates that no bug or error was missed by the tester.
- Reviews important change requests and issue details.
- Assess the product quality before it moves ahead in the development process.
- Allows the team members to effectively monitor each and every testing phase of the development process.
Read More: How to write an Effective Bug Report
Why is important to create Test Evaluation Report?
- Test Evaluation Reports are essential for making sure that the product under development is achieving an acceptable level of quality before it is released to the market.
- Stakeholders and customers can take corrective actions if needed for future development processes.
- Done right; this can add true value to your development lifecycle by providing the right feedback at the right time.
How to create a Test Evaluation Report?
An effective Test Evaluation Report should contain the following components:
1. Project Information
All the information regarding the project and the customer, such as Project Name, Customer Name, and Project No. etc., is mentioned under this section. For a Change Request (CR), the CR number can be mentioned as well.
2. Introduction
The introduction section can consists of the following:
- Purpose: This describes the purpose of the Test Evaluation in terms of test coverage and defect analysis.
- Scope: This describes the scope of this document; associated project(s), and other items of interest to the test team.
- Definitions: This can contain definitions, abbreviations, and acronyms required to interpret the Test Evaluation document.
- References: This identifies the documents referenced in the Test Evaluation Summary by title, report number, date, and author.
- Overview: This describes the rest of the Test Evaluation document and how the document is organized.
3. Test Results
Test Results are summarized in this section. Test Results are generally the outcome of the whole process of the Software Testing Life Cycle. The produced results offer an insight into the deliverables of a software project which represents the project status to its stakeholders.
4. Test Coverage
Test Coverage is covered in this section which includes both the Requirements-based Test Coverage and the Code-based Test Coverage. Test Results of both the coverages are mentioned here and are compared with the previous test results.
5. Recommendations
This section identifies any suggested actions that need to be made based on the evaluation of the test results. These recommendations help the developers/stakeholders to understand and work accordingly for the next phase in the development life cycle.
6. Diagrams and Graphs
Under this section, diagrams, charts, graphs, or other data visualization of the test results can be added. This helps in better debugging and root cause analysis
Test Evaluation Report Template
Following Test Evaluation Report template can be followed:
Customer Name: | Date: |
Project Name: | Project #: |
Introduction | |
Purpose: | |
Scope: | |
Definitions, Acronyms, and Abbreviations: | |
References: | |
Overview: | |
Test Results | |
Requirement-based Test Coverage | |
Code-based Test Coverage | |
Recommendations | |
Diagrams | |
Best Practices to create a Test Evaluation Report
A Test Evaluation Report is a kind of communication tool between the Test Team and the stakeholders. Through this test report, the stakeholder can understand the project situation, the product quality, and other things. Hence, there is a need to develop good Test Reports.
A good Test Evaluation report should be:
- Concise and Clear: The information captured in the test report should be short, clear, and easy to understand.
- Detailed: The report should provide detailed information about the testing activities whenever and wherever necessary. The information provided should not be abstract as it won’t help the stakeholders in drawing a clear picture of it.
- Standard: The report should follow a standard template as it is easy for stakeholders to review and understand.
- Specific: The report should describe and summarize the test result specification and focus on the main point only.
On a closing note
Software Testing is extremely crucial nowadays and is done by all businesses. It not only validates the product quality, but also makes sure that the customer demands are fulfilled. Therefore, a Test Evaluation Report, provided after the Test Summary Report completion, is very important.
The goal of this report is to deliver to the stakeholders a detailed evaluation and assessment of the test results and the methods used for testing. The information collected here is presented to the customer with an evaluation from the testing team, which indicates their product assessment against the evaluation mission.
Tools like BrowserStack allows you to test on real devices and browsers, at the same time you can also get text logs, console logs, video logs, screenshots, and share those on Slack, GitHub, Jira, and Trello for better defect management within the team. It helps in collecting all the necessary information that can be used to create a comprehensive Test Evaluation Report.