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how do you troubleshoot with "works on my machine" scenarios

It happens lot of the time that when you report a bug to a developer, he comes back saying "it works on my system" though its a browser app. How do you go about sorting that out ?

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Vikram Avatar asked May 08 '09 08:05

Vikram


2 Answers

From a training/process point of view:

Train your team to know that "works on my machine" is not a get-out-of-jail-free response.

Have an automated build server.

Have an automated test deployment.

Your developers must know that "works" is defined as "works on the test server", not just their machine.

From a testing/debugging point of view:

The developer needs to be shown the sequence of actions that result in the bug happening.

You might want to capture screenshots showing the bug, or possibly a video capture (using tools such as Camtasia). People can be quite bad at describing the sequence of actions that they performed on a system that led to a bug showing itself, so the more information you can capture about the bug and how to replicate itself the better.

From a development/environment point of view:

If there is genuinely a bug that exhibits itself on one environment but not the developer's then find out if it exhibits itself on no development environments, or just your one developer's.

From thereon in it is a case of trying to reduce the differences between the two environments so that your developer can see the issue on his machine.

Or you can go the other way and attempt to debug the issue on the production (non-development) environment.

Implementation details of these vary by platform.

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Richard Ev Avatar answered Sep 21 '22 07:09

Richard Ev


You need to give as much information to the developer as possible. Even stuff that you don't think is relevant.

I can't count the number of times I've had a problem reported and couldn't repeat it, only to find out later a piece of information that the user hadn't originally included but was the key to unlocking the puzzle.

You also need to not accept that answer and say "well something must be different between your set up and mine, what can we do to sort it out".

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ChrisF Avatar answered Sep 19 '22 07:09

ChrisF