thoughts from the test eye

I hope you are all familiar with Cem Kaner’s RIMGEN for bug reporting. Your bug reports will be better if you Replicate, Isolate, Maximize, Generalize, Externalize and write with a Neutral tone.
The acronym doesn’t include everything about bug reporting, so I want to tell you about a little mistake I make now and then.

I find something that I feel is a bug. I reproduce it, and I minimize the steps needed so it is isolated and more clear. I think about in what circumstances this might have the most impact, so the team can assess the risks. At this point I realize that I haven’t looked if this is known already. I search in our issue tracking system, and sometimes I find that it is already reported, and I might add a comment, but no need to add a new issue.

Maybe I learned something in the process, so it wasn’t a waste of time, but if I had started with searching for Known issues, I would have had better information earlier, and could have jumped right to Generalize or Externalize if I thought we needed more information about the problem.

Therefore I recommend KRIMGEN, not RIMKGEN.