John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked to a couple of articles today on how to report a bug. First, John linked to this great writeup by Steven Frank, one of the authors of Transmit. He’s got some very good specifics on the sort of content that developers find most useful in a bug report. Second, John linked to a laundry list of ‘Best Practices’ that Apple hosts on their developer site. Much of the specifics related to the format and tools that Apple uses, but the practices themselves line up quite nicely with Steven’s post (and, not terribly coincidentally, with the details that help us in the MacBU.)
Rick Schaut, one of our long-time developers in the MacBU, has a few blog posts about what it’s like tracking down a bug from a developer’s point of view (see Repro, Man and Anatomy of a Software Bug on his blog).
On a related note, I haven’t forgotten about my promise in the comments on my last post about the Office 2008 updaters. We’re still looking at some things internally. I’ve received a number of emails listing details about user setups and what they think the problem is, but when I’ve tried to reproduce the same setup and problems at work, the updaters function just fine. So, I don’t have anything concrete to offer yet. If you are running into updater problems, please consider reinstalling from your original DVD, and keep careful notes about what you do as you run the updaters (see, there was a point to the initial paragraph and title!) so that you can tell me/us as much detail as possible.