Effective Bug Reporting

Filed Under: Exclaim Web Infrastructure

There are a number of ways of ensuring your bug report is as effective as it should be. Below are some tips to give us a top class bug report.

The more detailed the description, the better we can understand what you are on about. Here's an example:

Bad:

Title: Exclaim does not work
Desc: Exclaim crashes when I play a cd

Good:

Title: Kernel fault when playing a cd
Desc: When playing a CD, Exclaim causes a fault, with error code "General Protection Fault".

Giving your hardware specifications, any modules loaded and any other processes running helps a lot. Also give a “stacktrace” and any error codes if you are given one.

Try to make the bug happen a few times, and provide a good set of reproduction steps so we can try and reproduce the error ourselves. For example

1. Open MediaPlayer
2. Insert the CD "100 Greatest Hits from 1999"
3. Press Play as the CD is spinning up

So we can find the bug, put it in the right category. If you can't find the one you want, or there are multiple that your bug could fit into, put it under the one that best fits it. Only use Uncategorised as a last resort.

So as not to duplicate bugs, use the very latest version of Exclaim from svn to see if we have fixed the bug already. If you can't do that, contact a developer on IRC and one will try and find out for you.

There is a large chance that your bug has already been reported, search before reporting, you can comment and vote on already filed bugs.