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Tips for writing a good bug report

josh64x2 edited this page Sep 16, 2014 · 1 revision

Credit to jeff_johnson_dev - original post at Cocoaforge

Dear Vienna users, Thanks for reporting bugs here in the Vienna GitHub project! We are eager to hear about and fix any bugs that you discover in Vienna. With that in mind, here are some tips to help you write a good bug report.

The Goal:

The goal of a good bug report is to explain to us, the developers, how to reproduce the bug on our own computers. If we cannot reproduce the bug ourselves, then it is very difficult for us to fix it. Therefore, please be as detailed and specific as possible. Sometimes it is the tiniest detail that is the key to isolating the bug.

Questions:

This is a list of some of the questions we will want to ask you about the bug, so it would be very helpful if the questions are already answered in your initial bug report.

  1. Versions. What version of Vienna and Mac OS X are you currently using? Also, have you used any earlier versions of Vienna, and did the bug exist in earlier versions?
  2. Bug Description. What is the bug, and how exactly did it occur. Please describe in as much detail as possible so that we can try to reproduce it. Tell us what you were doing when the bug occurred. Numbered steps to produce the problem would be very helpful. Be specific about what areas of Vienna's interface were involved (the folders list, the articles list, the article viewing pane, web browser tabs, etc.).
  3. URLs. If the bug involves one or more subscriptions, then please give us the URLs for the subscriptions. If the bug involves a web site in a tab, please give us the URL of the web site.
  4. Settings. What are your preferences and settings in Vienna? We probably don't need to know everything, but try to give us the relevant ones. For example, if you're having problems with refreshing, what are your preferences for checking for new articles and for marking the current article read? If you're having display problems, which layout are you using (Report, Unified, Condensed), and which style are you using? If you're having problems launching Vienna, what are your preferences for checking for new articles and for new versions of Vienna on startup?

Posting the report:

Please post the bug report on Vienna's Issues page on GitHub. The developers monitor this page (by subscribing to its feed in Vienna, of course!), so we will see your bug report. Please put each bug in its own issue, separate from feature requests or other bugs. This makes it easier for us to track the bug and to discuss the bug with users.