How To: Create a Climate for Good Bug Reporting

Any user should be able to report a bug in your organization. This includes users both internal and external. However, it’s hard to fix what isn’t aptly described. In this post, we’ll discuss how we can educate all users to find, troubleshoot, and report bugs.

Let’s begin with those inside your organization.

Internal Teams

By now, your process for reporting bugs (🙏) is in place. As reports come in, it’s important that issues are reproducible, tracked, and prioritized. Here are some good practices internal users can adopt which helps to create a better bug reporting environment.

Ask Around: Being an internal user (i.e. Sales, Client Support, Engineering), we have the advantage of accessing the team knowledge base. Someone on the team may have already found and reported the issue. Asking within and across teams can be a great way to find out what the current status of an existing issue is.

Check the Bug Board: Internal users should have some type of access to the Ticketing System the organization uses to search for and/or track bugs already reported or to find out if it’s been reported yet.

If the team member has asked around and checked the current tickets existing and still can’t find the issue they are seeing, they are ready to report the issue.

You can find a detailed outline for reporting bugs in my post How-To: Create a Bug Report. Double check to be sure you are using prompts that are clear and understandable for everyone in your organization .

External Users

Let’s start with Access: Approach your application or website from a first time user’s point of view. Is it obvious where you would need to go to report an issue? Does your site require several clicks before a user can make the report? Providing easy access to bug reporting will ease the frustration your users may feel when they come across an issue.

Field Prompts: Use field prompts that convey meaning to the majority of users. Using the word “Expected:” may mean nothing to your customers. Use phrases that clearly describe what you’d like them to explain. For example:

“What should be happening:”

“What is actually happening:”

“Provide a detailed description of what you’re experiencing:”

“What are the steps you were taking when you found this issue?”

Providing clear guidance on what information you need from your customers will help them give what information they know. Remember, they are reporting because they care and the issue is creating a negative impact. If they didn’t care, they would just ignore the issue.

Gather Their Report When they Report: Recently, I filed a bug report with the NY Times game Connections. On reporting, NYT logged information helpful to their development team thus saving me the work of gathering that information together.

Within your organization, research ways to see what information you can capture from the user to save them both time and energy!

Let’s circle back to Empathy: Why would empathy matter when it comes to reporting? Your users, both internal and external are experiencing something unexpected. None of us like to be thrown off our groove when we are going about the ins and outs of daily life. For anyone that files a report in your organization, thank them! They helped you out! And, hopefully, with the guides and prompts you’ve put in place, there will be a fix out in no time.

Don’t be this guy. The non-believer, the guy who doesn’t care.

Be the team that’s ready to roll.

Tell me about your experience! What strategies do you have in place in your organization to guide users to better bug reporting?

Till next time…