The bug reporting process is usually long, painful and unpleasant for everyone involved, where it’s a lot of times difficult to even define and find the exact problem. Businessmen and simple end users not always speaking the same language as the developers and because of that people are sending more angrier and angrier emails back and forth… the whole thing can be just a terrible experience. Wouldn’t it be great if a bug report would be easy to create and clear to look at while having every piece of relevant information? We have good news for you.

Bug Reporting 101

What is a bug report? Well, a good and easily understandable bug report must contain all the information the developers need in order to identify and fix the problem or problems the report is about. If you want to achieve that in an efficient and headache-free way the bug reporting must be as simple and straightforward as it’s possible. Essentially you have to create a user-friendly bug report.

Gather All the Information You Need, but Only What You REALLY Need

Just search for “bug report” in Google’s image search and after a few seconds of looking at the results close the tab as fast as you can. For those who don’t want to participate in this experiment you’ll see pictures similar to this:

No one wants to deal with a bug report like this. No one wants to deal with “endless chain of emails and screenshots” type of bug reports or bug reports you only heard about over the phone, etc. DebugMe offers a better way: a bug report with all the useful information by one click and a work process in a beautiful kanban system with everything you need to know, visualized. It does sound appealing, doesn’t it?

Bug Reports and Bug Reporting Be Like

There are four questions every bug report need to answer very clearly. The “What?”, the “Where?”, the “When?” and the “Who?”.

Let’s start with the first one. To solve the puzzle, you obviously need to know what happened. What exactly was the person who filed the bug report doing when he or she discovered the bug? What activity or action was the reason which “triggered” the bug?

The next question in line which the developers or the members of the bug reporting team need an answer for is the place of the discovery. Where was the user on the site, on which page did he or she find the bug? DebugMe is able to provide all of this information and much more.

To dig to the core of the problem the developers need to know the exact time when the bug first presented itself. It’s might be a bit trickier to determinate than the previous two, but just as important. If you could provide the accurate time when a problem first occurred then the bug reporting team will have a lot easier job. Or just let’s hope that they will, but you did everything you can to help them in their heroic quest.

And now, last but not least it’s good to know who was the person who found the bug. The bug reporting team should know his or her name, position, and email address.

How Can DebugMe Help in this Process?

Wouldn’t it be great if a little tool could answer all of these questions by one click? DebugMe offers you and your team just that. It’s a bug tracker which saves time, money and easy to use making the bug reporting process seamless and as pleasant for everyone involved as it is possible.

Comparing the above-mentioned facts to the circle of the traditional process of sending emails, taking screenshots and possibly editing them in Photoshop or in MS Paint, making phone calls as the developers still don’t understand a thing about what you are trying to explain to them… it does sound awfully painful, doesn’t it? DebugMe is here to help.

The tool has JIRA, Trello, Visual Studio, Pivotal Tracker, Teamwork and lots of other integrations, captures the URL of the page and all the browser information while letting you highlight – add – draw – hide anything you need on the screenshot. The context is there and every information is there only a single click away from you. DebugMe is easy to use, it’s fast, it’s straightforward, it saves money, it saves time and it offers a way better feedback experience for you, for your team and for your clients.

So what are you waiting for? Give it a try, it’s free 🙂