Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How To Get Non-Developers To Send Meaningful Bug Reports?
DemonGenius writes "I'm in the midst of a major rollout of one of our primary internal applications at work and we have a beta version available for all the staff to use. The problem here is most of the staff don't know how to send reports meaningful enough to get us devs started on solving their problems without constant back and forth correspondence that wastes both developer time and theirs. Some common examples are: screenshots of the YSOD that don't include the page URL, scaled screenshots that are unreadable, the complaint that wants to be a bug report but is still just a complaint, etc. From the user's perspective, they just send an email, but that email registers in our tracking system. Any thoughts on how to get the non-devs sending us descriptive and/or meaningful reports? Does anyone here have an efficient and user-friendly bug tracking system/policy/standard at their workplace? How does it work?"
Seriously, don't just keep blowing off the important user bugs for multiple release cycles. Once your bugs have been blown off for 6 months you stop submitting new ones.
Exactly. Make those people a browser extension that captures a screenshot, lets them paint a big red rectangle, a comment field, then annotates with things like all cookies for current page, browser history (on the current site), user email address, ...
Then teach them "something goes wrong, push the button".
And use a general exception handler that makes damn sure that the user id cookie is available inside the exception.