Anyone who uses the Internet for anything, whether it’s simply checking their emails or conducting their food shopping online, will most likely have encountered a bug or few. Generally bugs pop up when you least want them to - you’re right at the end of placing an order, you click the final button and…. poof! Some sort of error sends you into a frenzy of anger at the website developers.

I produce thousands of lines of code a week for various websites and know how easy it is for a bug to creep in - usually developers don’t notice them. Because of the large number of sites I get involved in, the other day I conducted some research into bug reporting tools. Why? Because it’s impossible for a developer to test every scenario their code might possibly be subjected to - hence bugs appear!

Perhaps the biggest problem with bug “control” is the reporting process; when it comes down to software programs, company Intranets and major websites for example, people just don’t seem to grasp the concept of “unless we know what went wrong we can’t fix it”.

The most important thing in bug reporting is to provide as much information as possible - error messages, approximate time it happened, what you did before the problem occurred. I found a very good and informative article by Simon Tatham which outlines in his opinion how to report bugs effectively - perhaps next time you encounter a bug in a website or program, let the developers know and they can try to fix the problem for next time!