It probably also helps the report rise to the level of “exceptional” if the reporter understands anything about the backend. If you don’t know what your even looking at its hard to explain tech specifics in detail about it.
I am not tech savvy and I had to report a bug at work for a website/program I have to use. My report was basically “X isn’t working [picture of x not working]”. Microsoft started asking me about my license number and something called RLS…I don’t know any of that. I don’t even know where to find that. I can barely Google that. I took 7 page clicks and 10 minutes just to submit the bug in the first place… My bug reports are shit because I dont know what Im looking at, an IT person probably would have included most of the info they were asking for in the original report.
If that means “row-level security” like I think it does and you’re reporting a bug as an end user, it’s ridiculous they’d even expect you to know that. It’s not fun but when you’re a programmer talking to a user, you need to ask the right questions to get at what you need to know, basically by inference, or by getting steps to reproduce the error yourself. That was not the right question. They fucked up, not you.
Thank you, this comment made me feel a lot better that I maybe wasn’t just being flat out incompetent right out the gate. Their questions made me feel pretty stupid and I appreciate your suggesting that its somethings I might just not have been exposed too before as my job is very not tech centric.
As a developer, all I ask for is a description of what happened, what you expected, and details on your configuration (OS, browser, hardware). It would be even more awesome if you could provide a set of steps to reproduce it, but that’s not necessary.
But honestly, a bad error report is usually more useful than no error report. I’ll probably disregard it if it doesn’t have much info, but if I see a lot of similar reports, I can glean info from them to get an idea of what went wrong. But if you have the above, that can mean the difference between a fix being done really soon or me needing to wait for more info.
