Bad reasons to disregard bug reports

A competent programmer knows that bug reporters are their best friend. You will know an incompetent by their response to bug reports.

Many IT professionals expect praise for the blessing that is their software, and take it as a personal offense that a problem should be pointed out. I hope that I have never been guilty of this kind of pathetic nonsense.

If you find here something you have done, said, or written in response to a bug report, you should experience a half day of severe shame and self loathing, then pull yourself off the ground and resolve to be a better software professional and a better human being. Of course, such behavior probably reflects personality flaws that could not be remedied so easily, flaws that provide you with a facility for disregarding any sound advice. However, hope springs eternal. So have a look at the companion page, Why every bug report should be carefully regarded.

I am writing this mostly to get it off my chest.

Here is a roughly categorized list of bad responses to bug reports. I have personally heard something to the effect of each, sometimes when I was the bug reporter, and sometimes when I was a programmer in development meetings with co-workers.

low professionalism threshold

• Only one user reported it
• Only a few hundred users reported it (No shit: the QWestNet policy at one time was to ignore bug reports until a thousand users reported the same problem!)
• Nobody else reported it
• The bug report wasn’t filled out the way we like, so we’ll close it.
• Nobody uses that feature anyway, so who cares if it doesn’t work?

the reporter is obviously…

• an idiot.
• not a programmer.
• not one of us.
• the enemy of our programming effort.
• one of my many hidden enemies.
• not using the latest, non-functional, secret, bleeding-edge version, which may (or may not) be released next year, at which time they wouldn’t be cool enough to receive it anyway.
• on the wrong side of a holy war that’s been going on about this for years.

…and therefore not qualified to report a bug

RTFM,

• when there is no relevant info in the FM.
• when the FM supports the bug reporter’s complaint.
• when the FM consists of a shelf of spottily-compiled documents from a half dozen companies, and another half dozen web sites.
• when there never was an FM at all!

missed the point

• The user doesn’t understand the code.
• The user is just doing it wrong.
• Smart users can learn a complicated work-around.
• I don’t think this is an important bug.
• Another piece of software (meant for a completely different purpose) has some behavior that (if you ignore the important details) is similar to the problem reported. Therefore this is not a bug.
• The reporter said they were doing A, but I suspect the reporter is wrong about everything so maybe they mean B. B is stupid, so, as I suspected, the reporter is stupid and so is their report.

duplicate

• Report is a duplicate of a report we closed before
• Report brings to mind another bug report we didn’t like

appeal to cluelessness

• I don’t see how this is a bug
• Works for me, so there is no bug

unfortunate perspective on life

• Reporter didn’t choose the right magic item in our bug-reporting program.
• No bug report was requested.
• I don’t like the reporter.
• Anybody who spends their time reporting bugs clearly has problems.
• Closing bug reports is what I do.

tiny violin prize

• We don’t have time or resources to fix all bugs.
• Fixing this bug would be too hard.
• We have lots of other bugs that we also aren’t fixing.
• There is no bug, there is no bug, why won’t you leave me alone?…there is no bug!

not our fault

• The problem is with some third-party software, so it isn’t our bug.
• The problem arises from some part of our product that I don’t deal with, so I’ll close the report.

somebody else’s problem

• The problem isn’t what we first thought it might be, so I’m closing the bug report.
• I talked to somebody in the other department about this, so I’m closing the bug report.

ignore it, maybe it’ll go away

• We don’t care about any bug more than six months old
• It’s just a duplicate of another report we’re ignoring
• This is an automatic script that cleans out bug reports that haven’t been addressed for more than 500 days.

institutional behavior

These are usually prefixed by a pronouncement like
"We don't say 'bug', we say 'feature request'".

• We don't fix feature requests.
• You aren't authorized to file feature requests.
• A feature request invokes sequence of actions that several people have to attend to and a cascade of meetings, by groups of people increasingly disinterested in the issue, and a stack of reports, which will be printed stored until the company goes bust at which time the reports will all be thrown out.
• in a whisper, to a fellow programmer, who notices a bug:
  Just fix the bug... er... implement the feature. Don't say anything. Don't file a feature request... it causes lots of trouble.