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Bug Reporting Etiquette

Posted by timothy on from the sir-you-have-a-tarantula-in-your-nose-sir dept.

Jamie Zawinski writes "Mozilla.org has a new article on Bugzilla Etiquette. Relevant to more than just Bugzilla, this should be required reading for anyone who wants to file a bug about any product, no matter what bug tracking system is in use. I especially like the mention that "'Open Source' is not the same as 'the developers must do my bidding.'"" Update: 03/19 21:26 GMT by T : If that link doesn't work for you without cutting and pasting, reader Stephen Ostermiller suggests "you might want to use this link which appears to be the same document mirrored elsewhere."

2 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Here's what I recommend by azav · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Realize that the developerr has NO idea what is going through your mind, or what you did to make the bug happen.

    CLEARLY report the problem like you are explaining it to a 3 year old.

    Report your entire platform. OS, vers, ram, vid card, prod vers, etc.

    If you take the time to clearly report the bug then you will not waste your time and the developer's time by having to respond to another email asking for more detail.

    You SAVE time by being extra clear when you report the issue.

    When I was at Macromedia, I determined that a mis reported bug uses 4-6x the manpower than one clearly reported one. This also means that poorly written bugs limit the number of bugs that can be fixed before shipping because of the extra manpower and time used to pass them back and forth.

    Good bug:
    QA reporter -> Qa manager -> Bug meeting -> Developer -> Bug addressed -> Original reporter -> Bug closed

    Bad bug:
    QA reporter -> QA manager -> Bug meeting -> Developer -> Bug addressed -> Bug returned to QA -> More info dded, more time spent getting more details -> bug returned to developer -> Bug addressed -> Original reporter -> Bug closed

    I know this doesn't look like 6 x the time but when measured, it got up to that high. Especially if a bug has to return more than once.

    --
    - Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
  2. Re:Two Way Street by Gerv · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In fact you can get the attitude from the Mozilla developers even before you make a comment see here

    Interesting - the author of the Spell Checker FAQ that you reference, and the author of the Etiquette document under discussion are one and the same. :-)

    The Spell Checker FAQ was the result of a frankly ridiculous amount of the behaviour decried in the Etiquette document. Rather than be rude to users, we attempted to use humour to make our point. So maybe you think it's not funny; but I think it's evidence of people attempting to be tolerant under difficult circumstances.

    Gerv
    (document author)