Reporting Test Results:

How to Write A Test Report

A Fundamental Practice in Science and Engineering

by Dwayne Phillips, PhD

June 2008

A 17 page summary with an emphasis on Test Reporting. This booklet includes a complete example test report.

Now available as a PDF that I will email you. Still $20. Email me at d.phillips@computer.org if you are interested.

Saddle bound with a stiff card front and back cover, size 8 1/2" x 11"

This format makes it easy to distribute to your staff and easy for them to use.

Dwayne Phillips has over 25 years experience testing systems. This booklet covers the essential basics in a skill that remains fundamental to building and testing systems of all types.

The booklet is available for purchase for $20 from CafePress at cafepress.com/dwaynephillips .

Preface to the Booklet

I was working in an engineering organization where we were struggling with several system developments. We would visit each of several engineering firms in turn to learn that all was well with their part of the systems. At the end of the monthly visits we were in the same place we began - holding systems that should work, but didn’t.

We were testing the systems ourselves, but we couldn’t seem to produce similar results from all our tests. Each testing engineer would walk in the door with a vastly different set of test results. Time, money, and engineering resources  were dwindling with no final system in sight.

I asked around the office for a set of standard testing practices that we could all use. Perhaps, I hoped, if we all used the same standards for testing and test reporting, we would come to some conclusions. No one in the office had such a standard. One of our staff taught university courses several evenings a week. I asked if he had access to some college handbooks that delineated basic practice. He had none.

I searched the Internet. All I could find was a guide for a high school science class. I used the information from that high school. I formatted the information for our purposes, and wrote the following paragraph as an abstract:

A fundamental task of ours is to test or experiment with our equipment. This document describes a standard set of expectations for how we conduct and report on tests and experiments. The information herein is neither complex nor original. It is, however, important in that poorly performed and reported tests and experiments introduce unnecessary waste and prevent us from conducting necessary operations. A basic reporting template that we expect people to use is provided.

To some surprise, this worked. We began to perform repeatable experiments; we saved test data for future tests; we reported results in an understandable manner, and we concluded several successful system developments.

As stated above, the information contained herein is not new or groundbreaking. As the subtitle of this booklet proclaims, this contains some time-honored fundamentals for the sciences. I hope it proves valuable to you.