Efficiently asking questions to debug
When you receive a bug report, you often have more questions. Even if you receive a crash report with some data, you usually need more.
What browser were you using? What is the operating system version? Which video card model and driver version? What happened right before you clicked the thing that crashed? What is the repro rate?
Unless it’s someone on your team, you will likely be communicating asynchronously by asking questions over email.
To make this easier for everyone involved (especially you):
- Think of as many useful data points as you can and list them out. Imagine you got a reply, and think about what you would ask next and include those too.
- Order the list by importance.
- Go through each item and remove redundant ones, and figure out if there are requests that will handle several at once (one example is a dxdiag report).
- Write instructions about how to get each requested data point or file.
- Format them with a numbered list because often people will only answer the last question in an email.
With this approach, you’ll minimize back-and-forth and make it easier for the person on the other end to provide you with the data you need to solve the bug.