DREWspective

Believe it or not, the title text is classed as an acceptable bug report in my current workplace.

I’m not joking; I’ve been sent this so-called bug twice before, albeit not recently. Since then, other equally vague "bug reports" have cropped up.

But I can’t retailiate curse at the people responsible, or throw it back at them with a nice little note saying

this isn’t a bug report; try again

or

could you be more vague, please

because - as usual - I would be seen as a troublemaker. I’ve been accused by the same company of being cynical, as I’ve probably mentioned before.

Why I’m still there is beyond me, but I think I should explain further as to why this is so bad.

First of all, the highly descriptive phrase "not working". Worth a shotgun to the head on its own.

The first question that springs to mind is, what is it that isn’t working?
In many of the offending cases, "not working" didn’t have anything to do with backend code (which I shouldn’t have been touching anyway), but instead was a tiny issue with CSS styling.

The second issue with something this stupid is that it wastes your time. Because you have no idea of what is wrong, you spend valuable time going through the code trying to figure out what it is. How deflated would you be if  you spent half an hour trying to decipher the message, only to find out that it referred to text that wasn’t bold?

I could have asked further questions, of course, but I remind you guys that this company condones such shitty "bug reports". If you allow something to happen, you condone it.

And then there’s "pls fix", to which I would leap from my desk and engage in a street fight.

I guess the main thing here is that I don’t like taking orders, especially from someone who is on the same level or lower (but has somehow been elevated in the company). To take orders from someone a thousand times more clueless, however, is an insult.

Maybe I’d have a little more respect if they actually came up with a solution. I mean, in the case of a style change, "make the font bold" would have given me a clue.

(I’m not a fan of "could you make the font bolder" and "can you space it out a little more" style "bug reports", but they at least give some idea of what I’m looking for.)

I’m not an authority on bug reporting, but there are three things that make up a half-decent report in my book.

• What happened: describe the error and what happens.
• How it happened: what you were doing when the error occurred.
• Background information: this includes things like your browser, browser version, screen resolution etc., i.e. anything useful and relevant to the error.

If you can show me any of those three in "not working, pls fix", I will gladly delete all of my web sites and sell all my earthly belongings.