Quick Testing Tips Your daily feed of short software testing tips…

Try passive voice

Today's tip come from dailytestingtip - a recent Twitter creation similar to this blog. It's been started by our newest QuickTestingTips author, Anne-Marie Charrett.

"If bug reports are getting developers riled up, try adopting a passive voice approach to writing."

The post then links to Ivan Walsh's post on when you should use passive voice. From that post:

When to use the Passive Voice:
1. To emphasize the action being performed; the active voice highlights the person doing the action.
2. To show that results are more important than the person/system performing the action, for example, ‘the errors were generated by the system.”
3. To avoid assigning blame to a person, for example, “An error occurred when the system overloaded.”