This article presents a requirement for our freelancers. Failure to follow the process might represent a breach of the Freelancer Services Agreement.
At Testlio, reporting a duplicate issue is considered unprofessional. You should always check in the issue-reporting section whether the issue has already been reported to avoid unnecessary “noise” for Testing Managers, Engagement Managers, and especially clients.
Never report a duplicate issue, unless you have been told otherwise, because this may also negatively impact your tester rating.
When Should You Consider an Issue to Be a Duplicate?
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, the issue you’ve found is a duplicate and it doesn’t matter whether you have a different device or OS than in the original issue.
Different flows but the same issues – Sometimes a single 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. When you come across an issue that has been closed, you should always check the reason it was closed. If issue was Rejected, then you should not report this as an issue. But if the issue was Addressed but you still managed to reproduce it, then you can report it in the correct way by creating a new one.
Example of a Set of Duplicates
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 looking at only the title is not enough and you need to read the reproduction steps and look at the attached screen recordings and screenshots to see whether you’ve found a duplicate or a new issue.
A Little Reminder to Every Tester
You're encouraged to focus on comprehensive testing to uncover the most impactful issues. Your value comes not from the number of issues you find, but the number of relevant bugs that the client chooses to fix. Testlio values testing that helps prioritize the most important issues, leading to a higher quality product.
How To Look for Duplicates on the Testlio Platform
Read an article on how to look for duplicates.
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