Sara Williams - What makes for a good bug report?

Posted: Jun 30, 2004 at 11:51 AM

By: The Channel 9 Team

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Sara Williams, head of MSDN, talks about how to write a great bug report. MSDN, earlier this week, turned on the MSDN Product Feedback Center, which is where you can report (and look up) bugs in the next version of Visual Studio.

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kinrowan

Jun 30, 2004 at 1:25 PM

Sounds a lot like what mozilla.org suggests for bugzilla use, and good advice for any bug reporting effort.
androidi

Jun 30, 2004 at 3:16 PM

Quite common sense, like good advice usually is. Have to see if the code editor selection rendering/gfx corruption bug is still around in beta1. It happened often and always seemingly randomly, sometimes it also disappeared suddenly. Trying to tell the repro steps for that one is a pain as I couldn't figure any common action I did before it came.
Tom Servo W-hat?

Jul 01, 2004 at 5:25 AM

The problem with listing repro steps is that internally they're using newer builds than us beta testers. And I've seen it a couple of times in the Office 2003 beta that my repro steps didn't work for the developers, because changes in the newer builds changed the way slightly to reproduce it, so I had a bunch of bugs that had to be reopened after a beta refresh.

So depending on what's reported, I'd expect the developers to take at least a quick look at the responsible code section, hoping for some "Doh" moment.
SarekOfVulcan If the answer is 42, what's the question?

Jul 02, 2004 at 12:15 PM

When I worked in PSS, I wrote a KB article about how to submit bugs. It's directed at VFP users, but the principles should apply to any language.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310179
SaraW

Jul 02, 2004 at 5:18 PM

yep - you can't always repro.
SaraW

Jul 02, 2004 at 5:21 PM

Not exactly - sometimes, the bug still happens in the current build, so the repro steps still work. If that doesn't work, we do keep the current public build available so that we can look at the issue you report.
Shmuelpro

Oct 19, 2005 at 4:30 AM

Sara Wrote:
"Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Boston!
Big changes for me… I've made the difficult decision to leave Microsoft. My husband and I are moving to Boston, and I’m taking the move as an opportunity to experience life outside of Microsoft. My last day here will be tomorrow, June 14th.

Of course, I'll really miss my friends and colleagues here, but I am excited about trying something new.

So, since I hate saying goodbye, I'll just say… See you later.

-Sara"

Goodbye Sara and good luck!