One of the unfortunate things about being a developer is that if I do my job really well, no one outside the company will know that I exist.

On the bright side, this lets me get away with a lot – generally, I need to worry a lot less about client expectations and timelines, which means that I can focus more on getting things done than on dealing with any pesky meetings. This lack of distractions tends to result in more focused work, because I can plan my day better and I’m less distracted than your typical Micah.

Unfortunately, if I make a mistake, mine are the ones that break things – a minor bug that I accidentally introduce can suddenly take down Inflight for a few hours, or make it so that users are unable to re-order their photos(if you’re an Inflight user, don’t worry; it’ll be fixed soon).

Just after Parade launched, one of the features that we decided to add was private galleries – and I was responsible for building most of it. It was a friday afternoon just before lunch when I finished the feature, and showed it to everyone. Everyone liked it, so I decided to deploy it right then and there.

Now, if you or someone you know is a developer, chances are you know exactly what happened. For those of you who aren’t, I’ll sum it up: my lunch was delayed by half an hour, as I frantically worked at getting every photo on the site to appear again. Users photos, our photos, Roth & Ramberg’s photos – they had all disappeared.

It turned out to be a minor issue that I had missed while developing locally – but for users, it was a showstopper bug. What good is a photo site if it’s not displaying your(or anyones) photos?

These sorts of ‘showstopper’ bugs are rare, but they still spring up – and trust me, when they spring up I’m even more concerned about getting them fixed quickly than you are.

The important thing to remember when you encounter a bug is that it’s more helpful for you to send us the steps to reproduce a bug than it is for you to e-mail us and say ‘feature is not working’.

‘feature is not working’ doesn’t tell me anything. It doesn’t even tell me that feature is not working – it just tells me that you’ve encountered something that didn’t do what you expected it to, and are e-mailing me about it.

A more helpful e-mail would have as much information as you could possibly give us about how to reproduce the bug, any relevant information about your computer, and screenshots if possible – along with a brief explanation of what you expected, and what happened instead. Here’s an example of a ‘good e-mail’:

I recently noticed that re-ordering Images in Inflight doesn’t seem to work as expected. When I log into my site at domain.com and go to my ‘Homepage Slideshow’ gallery, when I click on the ‘reorder images’ link, the images don’t seem to be draggable. I have experienced this behavior in IE7, FireFox 3, and IE5(mac).

This is a helpful bug report – By following the steps that the user tells me they’ve taken, I can either reproduce the bug – or I can’t. If I can’t reproduce the bug, the question then becomes whether this is a feature that is not behaving as expected(and therefore a UI issue), or whether the bug is browser-specific.

The better the bug report, the faster I can fix the issue – so next time you’re about to e-mail me to say “feature doesn’t work anymore!” or “the new link structure is not working on page ”, make sure you stop and gather as much information as you can to send with your report – you’ll be helping both of us.