How You Talk Yourself Out of Reporting a Bug
source link: https://www.tuicool.com/articles/hit/BNVji27
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It’s funny how universal it is for users (including programmers, including myself) to gravitate so strongly to “it’s probably just me / my crappy phone / my timezone / me not reading the webcopy / me not being deserving of love or working software / etc”. It might be an impulse to be kind and not blame the pitiable developers. Or it could be the fear of submitting a bug report that isn’t and feeling foolish.
Of course rationally it’s much better to just submit it and if we get toclose it as PEBKAC or could-not-reproduce or WONTFIX or whatever that’s A++ for us and definitely still valuable to have in the bug database!
Now I face a dilemma.
I want to tell you about Proper Bug Reports, because it’s a thing worth knowing, except that it’s totally at odds with the point of this entreaty. Because what probably overwhelms the above reasons not to report bugs is simply that it sounds like a hassle. So reading any further will only make it sound like more of a hassle.
And so let me beseech you: First just tell us something conceivably buggy happened. “When I submitted a datapoint just now the yellow brick road seemed like it turned purple.” Whatever it is. Even if probably you hallucinated (it happens).
Go on. We’re over at [email protected] mashing refresh waiting for you.
Ok, at severe risk of making the perfect the enemy of the good, we shall now tell you about Proper Bug Reports, which are like so:
What You Did (AKA Steps to Reproduce)
- Create a new Do More goal at a rate of 2 whatevers per week
- Go to advanced data entry
- Enter a new datapoint for today with a value of 800080 (the hex code for purple) and comment “#color”
What You Expected
That the datapoint would be plotted way above the yellow brick road and for the yellow brick road to be yellow.
What You Saw (AKA WTF)
The datapoint is plotted fine but the road is purple for a second before reverting to normal!
That’s it! It’s not a real example (I assume — I didn’t try it) but it would not be the most gobsmacking bug report we’ve seen if it were. Also, those three pieces of a Proper Bug Report — steps to reproduce, what you expected, what actually happens — are from Joel Spolsky and I think are pretty standard in software engineering. Feel free to make the day of the creators of any software you use by reporting a bug in that format!
Image credit: “Bug report” by Prettycons from the Noun Project with our own feeble attempt at Latin thanks to Google Translate
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