How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

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Todd_Z
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How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Post by Todd_Z »

I'm sure other people have addressed this issue:

Sometimes when you are developing a web app, people are testing it as you go along. Often they will explain a bug or feature request in a way that leads me (the programmer) to poke myself in the eye.

None tech folks dont understand the idea of being specific in terms of urls, location of the page, etc.

Has anyone seen a document which I could give to someone to teach them what a proper bug report or feature request looks like?
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Weirdan
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Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Post by Weirdan »

Proper bug report consists of the following parts:
  • steps to reproduce
  • expected results
  • actual results
These are basics of bug reporting.
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Maugrim_The_Reaper
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Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Post by Maugrim_The_Reaper »

Simple starting point: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lk ... -bugs.html (read both links at top of page)

The main thing is getting people to provide sufficient information that you (or the maintainer) can personally reproduce the bug. A failing unit test, for example, is incredibly useful. But any specific example works. If it's a feature request - they really need to explain it in detail as if they were proposing a feature formally (which they kind of are ;)).
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Eran
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Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Post by Eran »

This is an article I like to send clients - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
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Maugrim_The_Reaper
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Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Post by Maugrim_The_Reaper »

It's one of the two links from the Linux Kernel bug page too ;).
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