Working with Users

As a software engineer, you understand the value of a bug report. If nobody takes the time and trouble to tell you about problems, you won’t find out about them. And you can’t fix bugs you don’t know about.

Streamline the Process

Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to guarantee that users will take the time to report bugs or that those they report are of a high quality. But you can increase the likelihood by removing as many barriers as you can.

Make it obvious how to report a bug:

Place instructions (or better yet, a direct link) to how to report a bug in your software’s About dialog box, online help, website, and anywhere else you think appropriate.

Automate:

Install a top-level exception handler, and give the user ...

Get Debug It! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.