At Testlio, reporting a duplicate issue is considered unprofessional. The tester should always check in the issue-reporting section whether the issue is already reported to avoid unnecessary “noise” for Testing Managers, Engagement Managers, and especially for the clients, during a run.

Never report a duplicate issue, unless you have been told otherwise, because this may also negatively impact your tester rating.

It is all about the root cause - Identifying a duplicate comes down to whether the original issue has the same root cause as the one you found. If so, then the issue you’ve found is a duplicate and it doesn’t matter whether you have a different device or OS version from the original issue it was reported with. 

Different flows but same issues - Sometimes it is possible that the same issue can be found by taking different flows but the outcome is an issue that has already been reported. Again, it is considered a duplicate. 

Closed issues - Whether or not you should report already closed issues varies between projects. Sometimes, when you do come across an issue that has already been closed, then we recommend to always check the reason why it has been closed. If the reason is mentioned as “too minor” or “won’t fix” then you should not report this as an issue. But when the severity of the closed issue is marked as “high” and also labeled as “fixed” but you still managed to find the issue, then you can report it in the correct way by creating a new one.

Here is a set of filed issues that are all duplicates because they all have the same root cause, which is an overall problem with the push notification feature in the app.

[Push Notifications] App crashes when user receives push notification

[Calendar][Notifications] App crashes when user receives a reminder of an event

[E-mail][Push Notifications] App closes after receiving new email notification

As you can see, duplicates may sometimes be hard to find because other testers have submitted the same issue with different titles. Often even looking only the title is not enough, and it is necessary to read the reported issues reproduction steps and also attached screen recordings and screenshots to see whether you’ve found a duplicate or a new issue yourself.

We do encourage you to concentrate on testing and not just on finding issues. People tend to think that if you’ve only found one issue then you haven’t done your job well. This is not the case with Testlio. Let’s not forget that we value quality over the quantity approach to QA app testing compared to other crowd-sourced testing platforms.

You can read an article on how to look for duplicates.

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