Technical Report Writing

Technical Report Writing Technical report writing is use of effective language for conveying a technical, commercial or industrial message to achieve a predetermined purpose. The technical report should be more formal. Technical writers usually use a more formal writing style than do non technical writers. A degree of formality is required because the personal style of a technical writer must be secondary to the clear and objective transmission of information. Technical reports are not mystery novels, we should get to the point as directly as possible. Reports should clearly differentiate between facts and opinions. Because most technical reports rely on figures and tables for the presentation of data, the form and quality of the figures and tables are important in establishing the style and readability of the report. Before beginning to write the report, carefully select the data to include.

A good technical report will be in the following format, •

Problem statement:

• Solution approach • Types of testing • Test output

Problem statement: A problem statement is a clear concise description of the issues that need to be addressed by a problem solving team and it has to be presented in the beginning of the report. A good problem statement should answer these questions: • What is the problem? This should explain why the team is needed.

• Who has the problem or who is the client/customer? This should explain who needs the solution and who will decide the problem has been solved. •

What form can the resolution be? What is the scope and limitations (in time, money, resources and technologies) that can be used to solve the problem? Does the client want a white paper? A web-tool? A new feature for a product?

There should not be any ambiguity in stating the problem.

Solution approach: Once the problem statement is done, we should present the solution approach to the problem. This includes, • Presenting various approaches to the problem. • Description of all the approaches in brief. • Selecting a suitable and appropriate approach. • Explanation for selecting the particular approach. • Broad algorithm for the problem. Let us take an example of sorting a given set of numbers. Here we have various methods for sorting namely, • Selection sort • Bubble sort • Quick sort etc. We can solve the problem in any of the approach stated above but we prefer quick sort in doing it because efficiency of quick sort is better than any Other sorting technique.

In the same way we have to mention the solution approach, to solve the problem, in our report.

Types of testing: Once the solution approach has presented we should mention the various types of testing which our program has to undergo. The various types of testing are, • Unit Testing • Integration Testing • System Testing • Regression Testing • Volume Testing All this types of testing has to be mentioned. All the constraints on which the program is not executable are mentioned. We should specify in brief about all the types of testing and process undergone in each type.

Test output: The test output and discussion of the results is the heart of the technical report. Many readers are interested only in obtaining the quick review of the work afforded by the output and the concluding section. But readers who have reason to study the entire text of a report normally spend most of their time on this section. Here we present the output for the different inputs given. The output has to include the following, • Boundary conditions checking •

Screen shots of debugging

• Screen Shots of the Execution •

Screen shots of application during run time