

How to help your team write better bug reports - maxcameron
http://bigbangtechnology.com/post/i_love_it_when_you_find_bugs

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camwest
Max and I had a conversation about this piece and one thing we wanted to avoid
was pigeonholing our bug reports into a category system like I've seen so many
others do: Fill out 15 drop downs to describe the state of your machine when
the bug was found. What component, what OS, browser etc… There has to be a
better way than that right?

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Isamu
Add a bug button on the prototype? Integrating the bug reporting means you can
automatically supply a history of the last n things the user did, or whatever
debugging state you think is helpful, and the user will fill in the rest.
Similar to automatic crash reporting, except without requiring the crash.

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camwest
This is a great idea. I wonder how much state information we would have to
track for this to be useful.

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maxcameron
This is cool. But it wouldn't really help our internal team "understand" the
bug in question - if that's important.

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Isamu
The bug button pops up the usual form for the user to fill out - describe the
bug, etc. It's just that more extensive state can be silently added to help
recreate the bug, or at least provide the context that is often missing.

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maxcameron
I didn't write this for customers obviously - they deserve to report bugs in
any way they want. But I think developers need to do a better job helping
their team-members write better bug reports.

