We created BugReplay to save you time. Indeed, some of our customers have reduced the amount of time they spend on bug resolution by over 75%– that includes the amount of time it takes to report a bug, diagnose a bug, fix a bug, and test the fix.
The “bug report” has made great strides over the last few years. Gone are the days when you would wake up to this: “That thing on the site is broken. Please fix it ASAP.”
Today’s post examine's the elements of a good bug report, and how BugReplay can help you at every step. Dare I say- bug reporting can be fun for everyone! Here’s a sample BugReplay bug report so you can see what we're talking about.
The elements of a proper bug report include:
1. Title and description. It seems self-evident, but providing your bug report with a suitable title makes your entire team happy. You can keep track of the bugs better, your developers know exactly what they’re getting into without having to open the report, and your project managers can manage the tickets more efficiently. A good title and description help prevent the ticket from getting lost in the shuffle. What’s the problem? And where is it? Keep it short and simple. With BugReplay, you can add a title and description at several points in the process, and edit them later- when you first create the report in the browser extension or later from your dashboard.
2. Steps to Reproduce. What’s the expected behavior? What’s the actual behavior? Start from there. It’s always best to include a note on how to reproduce the bug in question. Include all the relevant URLs! (I don’t want to spoil the fun, butBugReplay captures the URLs– and a LOT of other data– automatically, so you don’t have to. You also don’t have to write out all the steps to reproduce. WithBugReplay, the screen recording captures exactly what happened, and when it happened, allowing the developers to see the bug for themselves.
3. Add some environmental details. Where did you encounter this bug? What operating system? What browser? Was the browser version up to date? Were cookies enabled? Okay, enough questions. None of that matters. Why? Because BugReplay captures all that information automatically.
4. Add the logs. Developers often want to see your console logs so that they can see what happened. Sometimes they ask for something that you don’t even understand. That often creates friction among technical and non-technical members of the team, or between QA and development generally.BugReplay automatically collects all the frontend data like JavaScript logs, network traffic, and resource timing information, as well as the backend data such as server logs and exceptions. Basically, all the data that you could ever want! And what’s more, all this data is automatically synched with the video, so you can pinpoint what’s happening at a precise moment. You can read more about our full-stack feature set on our Zendesk page. The technical documentation is also on GitHub.
5. Provide evidence of the bug. If you can capture a screenshot or a video of the bug, then it’ll make it much easier for everyone to get on the same page. Well, the cat’s out of the bag on this one. That’s our core product: all you have to do with BugReplay is open the site, click record, and you’re done. You can also take unlimited screenshots. Here’s the sample bug report again, so you can see exactly what you’d be getting!
6. Send the bug report to the right place. This one is important too. Don’t just send a bug report to the back of the queue. Instead, add the right tags (indicating severity of the bug report) and statuses (frontend or backend, web or mobile, is it design or development, is it in Project X or Project Y, etc.). BugReplay makes all that easy- you can assign the ticket, add tags and status, you can even write some comments in the ticket, or attach additional documents. You can keep the report private or share the report outside your team with a publicURL.
7. Integrate with your existing workflow. To make your life as easy as possible, we’ve also built some integrations, so that you can always make sure the bug report is easy-to-find and given its proper due. We have integrations with Jira, Slack,Trello, Zendesk, GitHub, GitLab, Asana, Basecamp, and Zapier. To sync the server-side data with your BugReplay video bug reports, we have all the documentation you need to set up with our APIs. We also have integrations withSentry and Papertrail, making it easy to incorporate data from third-party vendors. Our Bugsnag integration is in progress.
Speaking of integrations, there’s one more feature we’re excited to write about: automated testing. BugReplay began as a manual, interactive debugging tool. But we’ve now integrated with popular end-to-end automation frameworks to automate the entire BugReplay reporting process. If you’re an automation QA engineer or test engineer or other such position, we have integrations with Webdriver.io, Nightwatch.js, Cypress, and TestCafe. Check out more on our GitHub page. Or watch some tutorials on our YouTube page.
Happy (bug) hunting!
