A good bug report follows our rules, and provides all necessary information to identify the issue, and anyone who reads it can reproduce the behaviour without reading the entire report.

Also, the attachment follows the correct date and time format and shows the bug highlighted, which is crucial to identifying a bug, especially when it comes to visual bugs!

Good job, ambika.br28!

Input validation issues are linked to website forms, whether it’s an entire page asking for personal information or just one field to enter an email address to sign up for a newsletter.

This validation is essential because it verifies at least one of the following scenarios: the user entered information within a mandatory field, entered the correct type of information and followed the expected format.

In these forms, depending on the design, some users’ information may be more important than others; this is why sometimes forms accept letters in a telephone number field or numbers in a surname field, and this is also why websites validate users’ inputs differently.

For instance, the following screencast shows that the user is expecting to trigger the validation system upon entering an incorrect input. This type of expected validation is performed locally by the browser and is called client-side validation, in which the ideal case is seeing a read message displayed next to the field to tell users what went wrong.

However, when the expected red messages do not appear upon entering incorrect input, the most likely reason for that is NOT A BUG but a different validation system that has been implemented. This is the case on this Billing form on weather.com

This validation system occurs only after submitting the input to the server, and this is why this implementation is called server-side validation, in which a web server is the one that performs the validation after, usually, the user has clicked on a button like Submit or Send.

So, whenever you test a form, take into consideration these two ways to validate users’ input before submitting a bug report.

One of the most common form validation in testing is the email address field; this is why we got a comprehensive Academy article about it; check it out: Testing Email Validation.

And if you want to know more about form validation, look at this article: JavaScript Forms.

BONUS TIP: this case, with many others, can be found on our Bug Severity Assessments spreadsheet.

Try finding any bugs on this spreadsheet for the fastest and most efficient learning!