Bug Reporting

Wow to Report Bugs Effectively by Tatham Gave a pretty in depth explanation on how to report bugs. After reading it and looking back through, the essay itself seems to have some of the qualities of what the author describes as necessary for a good bug report.

Be Clear

It feels intuitive to say that the most important aspect of a good bug report is clear communication, erring on the side of beating a dead horse. For instance, referring to an application window or a variable by name every time you reference it in a bug report may seem like a bit much, but I imagine it leaves no room for confusion like saying the word ‘it’ in place of these objects would.

Be Thorough

I imagine in the FOSS world, most bugs will be reported indirectly as opposed to in person. These kind of reports may require that the programmer know literally everything about the state of the system as the code was running. What other applications were open, what hardware are you running on, what actions were taken leading up to the error? Any of these pieces of information could be crucial.

Read The Errors

I would hope for those involved in programming that this is not something that is frequently overlooked, but you never know. Errors give very important information that will probably help solve bugs.

Reading all of this, I hope I can incorporate it going forward in my next attempt at writing bugs. I’ve also saved a link to the page so that, in the future, I can send it to anyone who feels that saying “it broke” is error report enough..