There is a strain of software development personnel by whom complaints and bug reports are considered a nuisance, to be disregarded, insulted, and disposed of as soon as possible.
This page is my attempt to reveal the bloody obvious to these personnel. It is the positive companion to the page Bad reasons to disregard a bug report. I do not really expect that this could be of much help to those who are guilty of disregarding bug reports—they have deeper problems. It might be of some use as ammunition in a meeting with some unsocialized software genius. Hope, however, does spring eternal.
Only a tiny fraction of users ever report bugs at all. So a single report may represent a lot of frustration on the part of many users.
Of those users who do report bugs, only a small percentage take the time to write up minor bugs. So if a single person writes in that some small thing is clumsy or odd-looking, chances are, a large fraction of your users were also annoyed or inconvenienced.
The reason for the program’s existence must be for its benefit to users. (Otherwise, who is the program for? What is its purpose? Is it to please the programming team? If that’s the case, there should be no public bug report page, and the program shouldn’t be available to outsiders.)
Even if the user is “just using it wrong”, the fact that they have missed a point suggests that something could be improved.
You should ask yourself, can the user interface be made more transparent, to guide a user who isn’t on their toes? Should something in the user’s manual be re-worded or emphasized?
Two different, intelligent people, will often look at things in very different ways.
What seems like a non-bug to you would seem like a bug if you saw the (very reasonable) thing the user was trying to do.
The fact that you don’t see why a report is about a bug, or why it’s important, does not imply that the reporter is stupid. You should tell the user how you look at it, and asking the user how they are looking at it. Failing that, ask your collaborators.
From the point of view of a user, it makes no difference if the cause of your software failure lies in your code, or of some third-party software.
If you find that a bug lies in some third-party software, good responses include:
If you piss off bug reporters, you’ll lose them. This will make your job easier now, but will make you look like a fool later.
Don’t just drop the report!