On Tuesday 21 March 2006 09:36, Andy Pepperdine wrote: >On Tuesday 21 March 2006 13:58, Ross Johnson wrote: >> One thing is for sure though - providing a good problem description, >> clear reproducible steps and a sample test case will usually get >> your report confirmed by the QA people more quickly, and that means >> a developer will see it sooner. Beyond that I can't say. > >The difficulty is getting a good problem description. In my > experience, most users of any product need a special mindset to give > such a description, and if you ask two users to describe the same > bug, you'll get two very different answers. In our case, we are > expecting them to know how to describe something remotely. > Amen, give that man the golden hammer, he has hit the nail squarely i=on the head.
>If I was talking to someone about an issue, I would try to establish: >1. What did you do to create the error? >2. What happened when you did that? >3. What did you expect to happen? >This last one is important because it can often cause the user to > question their own assumptions and realise the problem for > themselves. Not always, certainly, but it may reduce the noise. > This is true. But in my lifetime as a troubleshooter, these symptoms cna often be sorted early on, and much of the prelims skipped. And thats how I tend to report things, assuming incorrectly that when I have encountered such and such, that the person reading the report innately knows how I got to that point, when in fact they don't! So I wind up answering what to me seem like a bunch of silly questions that are the equ of "of course I did that, whatdoyathink I am - a big dummy?" Its ended in an agreement to disagree more than once. >So I wonder whether instead of a single box for a description, we > should divide it into three questions as above. Or perhaps just prime > the box with three questions in it already. I've never seen this > tried, so I have no idea how it would be received. I think anything that would elicite the information you need to arrive at your own conclusions about the perceived problem cannot be anything but good. >One trivial thing though would be to reverse the version list so the > most recent are at the top (at least for Writer you've got to scroll > down to the bottom to find the most recent version). That too. -- Cheers, Gene People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word 'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's stupid bounce rules. I do use spamassassin too. :-) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
