process

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

It’s something that can’t be overstated in software development: a well-written bug report can make an engineer’s life so much easier. A poorly-written one can make your day a living hell.

Something that I find myself bringing to almost every client is a sense of what a well-written bug report looks like. This is largely carried over from my Launchpad days: we were a distributed team spread around the world, and we didn’t always have the luxury of high-bandwidth comms with bug reporters. Instead, we relied on well-crafted bug reports to give us unambiguous problem statements, and — where possible — unambiguous guidance for fixing those problems.