[RESOLVED] I need a standardized way to report bugs

Hi everyone - my boss actually asked me to post this question :) - he knows how helpful you all are to me!

My work environment is such that my customer has too much access to me. And our boss is offsite in another state. I have gotten into trouble numerous times by taking direction from my customer. I figured if he reports a problem to me or wants an enhancement, I'm to do it. But that is not the case. So I am trying to reign him in. It's gotten better, today he emailed me about 5x with "bugs" and suggestions, and copied our boss. He considers that "documentation" or a "change request". But that's not quite how my boss wants the flow to go.

So, can anyone suggest a template for reporting bugs and enhancements? Obviously any bug interfering with daily processing would get immediate attention. But my boss doesn't want me to get pulled off my development work for every little nit. So problems have to be explained -where did they occur, are they recreatable, what is the priority, etc. These would get submitted into a log book of errors that I could pick up every once in a while and devote some time to. What has worked for you?

Thanks!

here is a script that i use:
http://www.bluestatic.org/software/bugdar/

install it on your website and people all over the world can post bugs/suggestions etc.

Thanks...

We don't have PHP or MYSql. I'm SOL with this one then?

well you could get a cheap hosting package and set it up... or have an email account like "[email protected]" that everyone has access to, and who ever checks the email and reply to some of the questions, and someone else could reply to others, depending if they are read/unread

I dont know if this is quite what you mean but could you add a form to your program that acts as a bug report / feature request dialog? On here you would have things like "description of bug" , "is the bug reproducable under specific conditions or does it occur randomly" , "how often does it ocurr" etc etc and then when the user clicks OK you would use the System.Net.Mail classes to email your email address with the details of their bug report.
Obviously the main problem with this is that 1. they would need internet access to be able to send the email (which probably wont be a problem) and 2. they would need to specify an smtp server that you would use to send the email.
You could get around that 2nd issue by sending emails directly to your business' smtp server though (assuming you have one as almost every company I have ever seen has done). This would probably require you to "hard code" an smtp server username/password into your app though.

I dunno, just a thought :)

Well, I was thinking more of a template than the media. It's probably something that will get printed on paper and put in a binder. So it doesn't need any fancy interface like getting saved in a database. All I really need is an Excel or Word document with categories like date, description of problem, enhancement or bug, if bug - steps to recreate..., does it happen consitently or intermittently, priority, etc. My boss said if nothing canned was available he would just create it but he also suggested asking around. Thanks for the replies and help.

Method 1:
Running into the office as if your hair's on fire, interrupting the developer's work by talking about a minor bug which is critical to you and asking them to fix it as soon as humanly possible.

Method 2:
(This works for small projects) A backlog of some sort. Use an excel sheet on a shared drive, get the bugs to pile up there, let anyone keep adding their grievances there. Boss talks to the customers and gets them to decide on the priority of the bugs. Boss gives developers the tasks to work on. Developer protected from customers. Bliss.

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Originally Posted by MMock

Well, I was thinking more of a template than the media. It's probably something that will get printed on paper and put in a binder. So it doesn't need any fancy interface like getting saved in a database. All I really need is an Excel or Word document with categories like date, description of problem, enhancement or bug, if bug - steps to recreate..., does it happen consitently or intermittently, priority, etc. My boss said if nothing canned was available he would just create it but he also suggested asking around. Thanks for the replies and help.

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Havent you just pretty much defined your template there?

date, description of problem, enhancement or bug, if bug - steps to recreate..., does it happen consitently or intermittently, priority, etc.

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Originally Posted by chris128

Havent you just pretty much defined your template there?

date, description of problem, enhancement or bug, if bug - steps to recreate..., does it happen consitently or intermittently, priority, etc.

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You're right...and I was thinking that as I typed it. Maybe I was hoping someone would have this idea already implemented...I'm sorry, but my boss said to ask my forum...

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Originally Posted by mendhak

Method 1:
Running into the office as if your hair's on fire, interrupting the developer's work by talking about a minor bug which is critical to you and asking them to fix it as soon as humanly possible.

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You've worked with my customer!

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Originally Posted by mendhak

Method 2:
(This works for small projects) A backlog of some sort. Use an excel sheet on a shared drive, get the bugs to pile up there, let anyone keep adding their grievances there. Boss talks to the customers and gets them to decide on the priority of the bugs. Boss gives developers the tasks to work on. Developer protected from customers. Bliss.

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Bliss is my goal... I'm not sure my boss wants to be involved, though. I think the idea is to have bugs completely documented and prioritized by customers, then when I have some time scheduled for bugs I just go to the documentation and start with the highest one(s).

If you allow the customer to prioritize, they will all be priority number 1.

My first question is always: Does this prevent you from doing your job?

If the answer is no, it immediately falls to priority number 2.

Second question: Is there an acceptable work around you can employ until this is fixed?

If the answer is yes, it immediately falls to priority number 3.

going back to my idea, i think that i would be super easy for the customer to access your bug reporting software by going to your website, and it would be really easy for you, your boss, the developers, and whoever else would need to access it.

Your way would require that you read emails, enter them into the excel file, saving it etc...

And if later on your customer doesnt think that they need that bug reported, then they can remove it

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Originally Posted by Hack

If you allow the customer to prioritize, they will all be priority number 1.

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Yes but he would soon realize that out of the 10 priority one problems I would just pick whatever was most fun or the easiest to work on!

But I did like your method for which bucket they go into. And right now I'm working on none of them since they aren't life-threatening (no priority ones).

Thanks.

in case you are palnning to use any advanced system to track bugs than have a look at Bugzilla :D

I don't know what tools you DO have access to, but we had a home-grown system on our webserver.

It consisted of a web page with a bunch of text fields like Application version, screen or area where bug occurs, description of bug, how to reproduce, etc. etc. The user would submit these and they would be saved in a database. Actually, in one very simple table.

The project / team lead (your boss) would review these first thing every morning via another web page that listed all the fields, plus a "priority" field, and assign a priority to them. The coders would visit a page that listed all bugs, this page was visible to customer too. Any bugs with a "1" were handled right away. Anything else was put off till later.

Bugs fixed were taken off list, but not deleted from database.

We later added emails and tracked programmer who fixed it, and feedback from customer, etc. However if you are going to do anything more than the basics, I'd look into existing software. Bugzilla is a good time.

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Originally Posted by JPicasso

I don't know what tools you DO have access to, but we had a home-grown system on our webserver.

It consisted of a web page with a bunch of text fields like Application version, screen or area where bug occurs, description of bug, how to reproduce, etc. etc. The user would submit these and they would be saved in a database. Actually, in one very simple table.

The project / team lead (your boss) would review these first thing every morning via another web page that listed all the fields, plus a "priority" field, and assign a priority to them. The coders would visit a page that listed all bugs, this page was visible to customer too. Any bugs with a "1" were handled right away. Anything else was put off till later.

Bugs fixed were taken off list, but not deleted from database.

We later added emails and tracked programmer who fixed it, and feedback from customer, etc.

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This actually sounds a lot like our Project Request System (which my boss and I wrote in Cold Fusion :sick: ) Perhaps I'll talk to him about expanding its scope to include break/fix and bug items.

Well, we've got ours. My boss designed it. I would post it but it's very specific to our business. Anyway, thanks very much for the discussion.

Marlene