Automatic Crash Reports and Bug Reports
Given that software is getting more complex day by day, I think it's important for the creators of the software to make it easy to report bugs. If I as a user have to do tons of things to just get data to report an issue/bug/crash, then I might as well uninstall the software and move on to something that works instead of spending lots of time reporting the issue and also find it hard to even report the issue with all the details
I think a great way to tackle this problem is just to leverage automation. If the software fails, it should pull logs, data and whatnot that it can get so that the user doesn't have to do anything, and then the automation can also report the bug or give the data to the user, say in a compressed file (tarball, zip etc) and then the user can upload that file while reporting the bug. I think it's kind of a no-brainer in the modern era. One can see this in Operating systems where the OS asks if we want to report crashes, one example where I have seen this a lot of times in MacOS. I can't recall if Ubuntu or Windows had it when I was using them. I think they did and still would have it, I just don't remember it / know about it though.
One can also see the same in mobile apps, for example, in my Android, I can say "Give feedback" or something similar in some apps and it automatically takes a screenshot of the screen and then asks me what issue I noticed and I'm guessing it also probably grabbed some logs behind the scenes, not sure though
I think it's important to help users report issues, or else they might as well use some other software, software which works and move on, which is kind of like a given these days, given the fact that there is usually always an alternative solution
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Written by
Karuppiah Natarajan
Karuppiah Natarajan
I like learning new stuff - anything, including technology. I love tinkering with new tools, systems and services, especially open source projects