Topic: How to Write a Helpful Bug Report

Imagine a customer telling you that your product is not working. You would probably have many questions:

• How serious is the situation?
• Is there a defect in your product, or is the defect in another part of the customer system?
• Is the issue already known?
• Is a solution already available?

Now imagine thousands of such incidents from around the world. How would you analyze these incidents as quickly, efficiently, and accurately as possible? After all, each report is a chance to make the product better for everyone.

This scenario is the challenge that the WebBugs team faces every day. Ideally, the team would be able to investigate every bug report in person. But this approach is not realistic, so we have designed a bug-reporting site to help us gather the information we need.

Our goal is to assist developers in creating a report that is complete and compact. A complete report allows our team's developers to reproduce the problem locally. A compact report helps us focus the investigation so that we can quickly determine the cause of the behavior.

Let's tour the bug-reporting site to see how we pursue this goal. And note that this document applies only to bugs. It does not discuss the trail for reporting documentation issues and requests for enhancements, which are other options on the bug-reporting site.

Edited by moderator - 05May2007 at 12:18am