Page 1 of 1

FYI: Writing Bug Reports for Dale and the Support Team

Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2004 1:22 am
by Andrew
In light of the recent request by Dale, I am writing this quick tutorial on how to post a bug report for Dale.

In programming, tracking a bug can be a tricky business, particularly if the user has not told the programmer or support team some vital information.


I found a bug! Or did I?
Before you post a bug report, make sure you actually have found a bug. Sometimes, you may not have activated a feature or perhaps the computer is having an "off" day. Test your "bug" a couple of times to make sure it wasn't a "once off".


OK it is a bug, now what?
Well now you can prepare a bug report. In this report it is important to convey all the important information to Dale and the support team in a clear manner. So this means don't use topic titles such as "BUG!", "This doesn't work" etc. Use an intelligent title which allows other forum readers to know what is actually in your topic without writing an essay for a title.

We have had discussions before about people coming onto the forum and just seeing the word BUG about 50 times in the forum message listing. Remember, until Dale investigates - it is not an official bug yet.


What should I say and how should I say it?
- Product name (e.g. DHPOS) and version (e.g. 5.02)

- List any specific settings (e.g. those as in POSCONFG) that you have set which may affect this error occuring. You don't need to tell us everything about how the program is configured, just the settings you feel might be connected to this error occuring.

- List the steps, preferably in a bulleted list, such as this - so that the programmer or support team can go through and easily reproduce the error. (e.g. I pressed the X key, and then Enter)

- If it isn't clear from your steps what the bug is, describe what goes wrong after carrying out the steps you listed. (e.g. the program closes with a file access violation error in line 3)

That's it - easy isn't it? 8)

An idea which just occured to me is perhaps the CRNC news site will have a page where you can type all this in, then it puts it into the correct format (as described above) for you to copy and paste onto the forum.

Form

Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004 4:25 pm
by ChrisKraus
I like the idea of the form, you could even intergrate it with this forum software.

- Chris :)

Version number.

Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 6:22 pm
by Dale Harris
The most important think I need to know when you are reporting problems is the version number that you are using.

Last week I spent quite an amount of time trying to help someone with a bug only to find out he was using version 3.46 of the program (the current version is 6.14). Needless to say his problem had been fixed 18 months ago.

????????.POS

Posted: Sat Sep 25, 2004 11:10 pm
by Dale Harris
Lately I have been receiving reports of bugs that only occur whan using truly weird sets of configurations for the program. To even find the bugs I need to set the same configurations here. To accomplish this you must send to me your configuration file as an attachment to an email.

When you created your register file you were asked to give it a name like MYSTORE. In that case your configuration file would have the file name MYSTORE.POS That is the file you need so send to daleharris@prodigy.net

Hey man,

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2005 2:25 pm
by Dylan - logged out
Dale, home-dog, just make a form that has all you need to know in blanks in like word or notepad, I dunno. then we just fill it out, attach the conig file, then mail it 2 u.

--Dylan

Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:19 pm
by Andrew
Mmm, I think Dale gets enough mail each day.

The forum provides a good place for these reports because then eveyrone can participate and take the burden off of Dale.

Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 8:04 pm
by ibmsystems
Please Is This Really Hard??

Many Post's Don't Have That Info Is It That Hard?

New Post Idea

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 11:35 pm
by Tina
Lately while browsing the forum i see posts here and there about bug issues. I'm thinking it may be a good idea to keep all that stuff together in a new link. When new users see bug bug bug bug bug it may scare them off. I know we had talked about this issue before, but maybe it's time to do something again.

Suggestions?

Tina

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 12:41 am
by ibmsystems
I agree..... the only problem

We havent seen john in about 2 months dale found his admin account but worries john will no longer trust him beacuse if dale was to mess something up we could see this
phpBB: Critcal Error
Could Not Connect To The Database

:P

What?

Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 4:58 pm
by Dale Harris
Talbik,

Is "what" really?