Ivan

No bug reports != no bugs

It's difficult getting feedback about software.

Do people log bugs?

Mostly, you get no feedback. Sometimes people log bugs, but not very often. With open source software, or web sites providing some service, if it doesn't work straight away (and very simply), mostly people will ignore it and try the next thing that looks like it might do what they want.

If an open source project has no bugs logged against it, chances are that it's very little used (possibly because it's totally broken) rather than because it is so high quality that it has no bugs. When people do log bugs, it's against software that they want to improve, not software that they can't be bothered with. In fact, I'd say it's generally a good sign if a project has several bugs logged against it and a bad sign if it has none. And yes, I have at least one open source project in the no bugs category (and I think it's good despite what I've just written)!

From "oops" to "ah ha"

I remember a few years ago, I released a new version of Jester (as a zip file). It was downloaded a couple of dozen times before someone (thanks - sorry I've forgotten who it was) told me that they couldn't unzip the file. It turned out that it had got corrupted on upload to sourceforge - I hadn't expected that. Of course, since then, I download and check that the zip wasn't corrupted (a bit of a pain, and I've not had a file corruption problem since, but I guess these things happen once in a while).

Your responsibility to kittens

In his keynote speach at last years ACCU conference, Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu founder) said something along the lines of "every time you fail to log a bug, a kitten dies". I like the sentiment. Please do log a bug, even if it seems so obvious that you think that surely the creator of the software (or person running a website) knows about it.

Knives behind your back

In the case of my open source projects, sometimes I'll google to see if someone has said anything about any of them. Sometimes I'll find an article slagging off one of my beautiful creations by someone who hasn't thought to tell me their criticisms or log any bugs.

Ignoring feedback

When using the O2 website I tried to do a search and got the following very obvious error:

Try it yourself. Simply enter anything in the search text box and press the search button. Following my own advice, I sent o2 an email about this (8th September). I tried again tonight (30th September) and got the same error. Never mind. I'll continue to try to save the kittens.

And another thing

There is a whole other article I could write about how to write bug reports ...