How Do You Get Better Bug Reports From Users? 205
itwbennett writes "You can try to train them, you can try to streamline or automate the process, you can demand that all bug reports go through a middleman (i.e., a QA tester) or you can throw up your hands and accept that users will forever submit bug reports that in no way help you solve the problem. Like the stages of grief, you've probably tried or experienced all of these at some point. But have you found any approach that really works for getting useful bug reports from your users?"
Re:Follow up (Score:5, Funny)
It's not working can you fix it. kthxby
Re:Follow up (Score:5, Funny)
Your users aren't code masters and never will be.
It doesn't involve users to be code masters, it just involves them engaging their brain a bit. I frequently get bug reports along the lines of "something broke last week, came up with some error (I don't remember what), but I rebooted it and its fine for now; please fix it so it doesn't happen again". You don't have to be a "code master" to figure out that reporting a bug and not actually tell me _what_ broke, what the error was or let me log into a system that is currently exhibiting the problem so I can look myself is not going to be condusive to me fixing things.
And this stuff happens again and again with the same customers... "one of our users is having a problem accessing some websites, please can you fix it?" - ok, so I have to go back and ask "which user" and "which websites", if I'm lucky the customer will give me this information, if I'm unlucky I get "I didn't ask". A week later I'll get an almost identical problem report from the same person about a different (but extremely similar) problem, and again none of the information I ask for _every_ time is included.
Also the great one that comes up occasionally is "this has been broken for a month and you haven't fixed it yet!".. well, if you'd actually told me that there was a problem I might've known to look into it, but since this is the first I've heard of it...
Re:Follow up (Score:5, Funny)
You can reproduce the issue by getting their keystroke history. File an FOIA request with the NSA.