Software bugs

Marie Hagman writes a Bug Reporting Best Practices guide with a focus on reporting bugs that are likely to be fixed:

Bugs that less likely to be fixed:

It would be great to fix every bug in the product, but it’s also great to ship J. In prioritizing which issues to fix, here are the some factors that cause certain bugs to miss the triage bar. Bugs that are least likely to be addressed:

• Are not reproducible or very hard to reproduce. This may be because the problem occurs intermittently or there are not enough details in the bug report
• Have strange and complex steps to introduce failure
• Have no perceived customer impact
• Are edge cases
• Risk introducing greater instability through the bug fix then the bug itself causes. Especially late in the product cycle, the bar for these types of bugs is very high because the bugs that may be introduced by the fix we will likely not have time to fix.

Popularity: 54% [?]

Isaac Jones has an article explaining how bug fixing is a good path into free software (and a software development career).

Via Debian weekly news.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Good technical questions have many similarities with good bug reports: see in particular The Cardinal Rule of Reporting Technical Problems:

Never, never, never, never, never say `doesn’t work’.

Never.

Proper Prophylaxis:

Just say “I wanted X, but it does Y. How do I get X?”

Popularity: 51% [?]

Telsa sent a link to her Making the right sort of difference: bugs and what to do with them summary from her talk at linux.conf.au 2003.

She writes that she has recently had an opportunity to confirm that bug numbers are increased by an approaching deadline…

It covered a lot of material: finding bugs, reporting bugs and getting people to fix bugs for you.

You can also find an Ogg Speex audio recording of the talk at planetmirror (Australia only) or on the LCA 2003 ISO image distributed by various mirrors (see the linux.conf.au 2003 site).

Popularity: 58% [?]

Simon Tatham, the author of PuTTY, has an article on how to report bugs effectively.

Popularity: 38% [?]