Comment by cs702

Makes total sense. You're unlikely to use Linux if you're not something of a power user, at least. I would guess there's a lot more developer type people who use Linux, and they are the people who appreciate a good bug report.

Same people also have a better idea of what might be causing the bug, how to get more information, logs, and so on.

I think the title was intentionally a little clickbaity but I'm not exactly bothered by it. Clickbaity is a negative when the bait-and-switch robs you of the pay-off. In this case, I think it was overall a more interesting story and so for me subverting my expectations was actually a pleasant experience.

Reminds me of a tweet from Yann LeCun a while back where he bragged that they take down more reported content than other social sites. While at the face of it, this seems good, what it really means is that their system is worse at proactively taking stuff down before it gets reported. If they took everything down that violated their terms of service before it was noticed by someone else, they'd have a 0% follow through on these take down requests.

Multicapitalism might be the more academic term.

A developer invested time to support linux not necessarily for financial return but social capital returns in the form of more helpful QA feedback.

Marketing/PR depts never see it that way. They open up new tickets, and that's the metric they care about. Not justifying it, but marketing depts rarely get it right.

It's interesting to compare that guide "How to report bugs effectively with ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" [1]. They both cover similar material, but the styles are extremely different. The latter is rather hostile to the reader: "If ... then you are one of the idiots we are talking about." "If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the losers." It's also heavy on "us vs them", how we are experts and you need to treat us properly.

You know, it just occurred to me that the "How to ask questions" document is targeted as much at hackers and how they should maintain their "standards" than at users who are asking questions. For example, the document has approving examples of "logically impeccable but dismissive" hacker answers; these make more sense as instructions on how a hacker should respond than as something relevant to a user.

I guess my point is that I had read the "How to ask questions" document for decades and viewed it as an objective document, not realizing how arrogant and "gatekeeping" it is.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Thank you! I’m definitely guilty of mongoose-ing and diagnosing in my bug reports so this is very helpful!

Yeah, that was basically most of the bug template we were filling when I used to work QA at Warner Bros. Games.

    Summary :
    Steps to reproduce :
    Expected result :
    Actual result : 
    Build/Version :
    And a few more fields about platform, severity, etc. on Jira.

Very important to also ask: Which application. Get an URL if at all possible. If someone says 'the calendar program is down', I have at least 5 candidates, and 50/50 chance something I've never seen pops up.

Users tend to rename programs, even give them names of other programs. Our entire finance department can't wrap their heads around the fact that 'Oracle' is not a bookkeeping application. Worse, they are now convinced the new version is called 'fusion'. Oracle financials? Never heard of.

One more tidbit: In the "When I do this", I find it useful to omit stuff that isn't interesting. Does the thing fail if I do something immediately? Or does it only occur if the application has been dormant for a few minutes? Does it only occur using the mouse, or can I use the keyboard?

Get a good set of steps for reproducing the problem, but wander a little off those steps to see what is actually necessary. I've been surprised more than once when something that I thought was incredibly complex only required a few steps. And also been surprised when a complex repro was actually complex (e.g., if I drag quickly it works, but if I drag slowly it doesn't? what?).

...4. And this is my software version and Linux distro.

Ugh no thanks, I'll just send them a screenshot and say "it's broken, please fix this!"

If it's good enough for my colleagues to submit tickets like this, it's good enough for me!