Incident in software testing

§  While executing a test, you might observe that the actual results vary from expected results. When the actual result is different from the expected result then it is called as incidents, bugs, defects, problems or issues.

§  To be specific, we sometimes make difference between incidents and the defects or bugs. An incident is basically any situation where the system exhibits questionable behavior, but often we refer to an incident as a defect only when the root cause is some problem in the item we are testing.

§  Other causes of incidents include misconfiguration or failure of the test environment, corrupted test data, bad tests, invalid expected results and tester mistakes.

 Incident reports in software testing

After logging the incidents that occur in the field or after deployment of the system we also need some way of reporting, tracking, and managing them.  It is most common to find defects reported against the code or the system itself. However, there are cases where defects are reported against requirements and design specifications, user and operator guides and tests also.