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How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 10:31 am
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?

Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 10:38 am
by Weirdan
Proper bug report consists of the following parts:
  • steps to reproduce
  • expected results
  • actual results
These are basics of bug reporting.

Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 10:40 am
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 ;)).

Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 11:32 am
by Eran
This is an article I like to send clients - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

Re: How to teach someone to report bugs / feature requests

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 11:48 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
It's one of the two links from the Linux Kernel bug page too ;).