Handcrafting a Bug Report Like a Champion (part 2)

This is the second part of a two series article on Handcrafting a Bug Report Like a Champion. We will cover the second pillar on bug reporting in this blogpost.

As we have already gotten ourselves acquainted with the building blocks and the semantics of how to communicate our program faults with a programmer, now its time to stress on the importance of the eloquence of the report. Albeit there is no silver bullet and each and every programmer would prefer bugs reported in a different way we hope to shed some light on the general economic consent of the blogpost - to save time for both parties.

1) Use bullet points (don't write novels)

Make sure you are stressing on the actions, rather than giving a vivid description on what you did and rectify your current emotional state. The idea behind using bullet points is when the developer opens the email he can quickly glance and try to reproduce the issue. The bottom-line, time saved for both parties.

• Bad Example: Dear iSenseLabs, I have just installed my iCustomFooter module but I am getting the styles a bit to the left on my footer. Also I am not seeing the payment icons load. You have advertised everything to be working and I have tested it in the demo. Please advise immediately.
• Good Example:

Hi, iSense!

Just bought iCustomFooter and found a bug: 

- Go to my website www.mywebsite.com

- CSS seems to not load, the footer styles are crooked

- Payment icons missing (screenshot attached)

2) Be concise
Again, don't go into the abyss of wordliness and simply state what is wrong. Try to take out as much of words as possible, but not more than you have to.

• Bad example: I've discovered a serious issue while i was using iAnalytics today. When I login into my admin panel with my username and password and go to Extensions/Modules and click on iAnalytics. Afterwards I go to filtering and choose to filter by date by clicking on the tab for that. Reluctantly, I believe I am not getting valid results as I have tested and….
• Good example: Tested iAnalytics filter by date results with keyword Ariel and the results for the keyword Ariel are not getting output

3) Be specific 

A developer won't be able to act upon the matter if he is hesitant about what exactly is wrong. To leave no white spaces be specific.

• Bad example: The button won't let me activate my stuff
• Good example: The "Activate iColorPicker" button returns a PHP 404 Error

In this series of articles I hope I have thrown some light on how to better report bugs. So next time you are about to report a bug, do it like the champion you already are!