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> There is nothing more annoying than a picture of a block of text Oh, but there is: Videos of bug reports where a person first has to explain that they have f

> There is nothing more annoying than a picture of a block of text Oh, but there is: Videos of bug reports where a person first has to explain that they have found a bug, and they will try to reproduce it now, and if you're still watching after 3 minutes you might see the important 5 seconds of the video, that could have been expressed in a few well-written sentences!

tppiotrowski 5y ago
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage many would agree with. People intuitively can ‘show’ you what’s wrong but most non-developers will have a hard time phrasing it. “I press the button and nothing happens” is representative of written bug reports I’ve seen. What button? What’s supposed to happen? What page are you on? How can I reproduce this? Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. But I agree that they should be succinct.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. But I agree that they should be succinct. As long as we retain those opening, over-amplified metal riffs. Jump scares are why I watch tech vids.
- gweinberg 5y ago
  That can depend on what it's a picture of. A picture of a block of text is usually not as good as the text as text.
- dahart 5y ago
  > Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. Oh yeah, totally, my experience has been that video bug reports are literally a thousand times better than text bug reports. I've worked in console game dev where we even required reproducer videos because they're so much better at showing the context of what happened. Often the text description was wrong and/or wildly incomplete and/or full of assumptions the user made about how things work or what's going on, and the video would demonstrate the issue and allow me to not have to engage in a lengthy back-and-forth conversation trying to understand the situation. > “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage many would agree with. I do too, but until now, I had never read that the other way around, that a picture might cost a thousand words. ;)
banana_giraffe 5y ago
My favorite version of this trope is a video of a computer screen taken from a poorly held phone. Bonus points if the video is in portrait, cropping off important bits of text. Sure, not everyone's comfortable with a computer, and they think they're clever with a solution. I still get annoyed when I get one of these videos.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Don't forget that the image will also be in HEVC format and will be >5MB.
bluedino 5y ago
There was a vendor we had, they used the free version of a popular screen recorder for ALL their support tasks. Put in a ticket asking how to do something? They sent you a link to a very slow-moving screencast of going in and turning an option on/off or configuring a setting. No audio! Their knowledge base articles were just a collection of links to screen recordings! It was so annoying. Guess what happened when that company shut the free version of their app down...
GuB-42 5y ago
But which well-written sentences? If you do a minimum of testing, bugs often depend on context. For example, in case of a UI bug, maybe the user zoomed in, maybe he is using a non-default font, maybe he is using a different locale, maybe he did some action without realizing it (ex: scrolling, resizing the window), maybe the time is incorrect, etc... "I click that button and it crashed" isn't going to help you there, you know it doesn't crash, you use that button all the time... If it is as straightforward as it looks, watching that 3 minute video is your punishment for not testing. Yes, I know, I don't test either, but don't blame the reporter for it.
- TonyTrapp 5y ago
  I agree that a video can provide more context than text does. However, most videos I have received as bug reports in the past failed to do that. I just saw the user doing random stuff leading to random events. I'd say that often the most important thing to have is actually not a well-written bug report or a well-made video, but rather having access to the user's settings file and logs (if that exists for the application), as they often contain the explanation of why you don't see what the user sees.
wingerlang 5y ago
I love video reports, even bad videos since you can just ask for clarification and usually they point out what they were trying to show and you get the context from the video. I like it so much that I've considered implementing always-on screen recording in our QA debug builds.
no-dr-onboard 5y ago
Sounds like you work at H1 :)

tppiotrowski 5y ago

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage many would agree with. People intuitively can ‘show’ you what’s wrong but most non-developers will have a hard time phrasing it. “I press the button and nothing happens” is representative of written bug reports I’ve seen. What button? What’s supposed to happen? What page are you on? How can I reproduce this? Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. But I agree that they should be succinct.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
> Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. But I agree that they should be succinct. As long as we retain those opening, over-amplified metal riffs. Jump scares are why I watch tech vids.
gweinberg 5y ago
That can depend on what it's a picture of. A picture of a block of text is usually not as good as the text as text.
dahart 5y ago
> Almost all issues I’ve seen with a video I can reproduce. Oh yeah, totally, my experience has been that video bug reports are literally a thousand times better than text bug reports. I've worked in console game dev where we even required reproducer videos because they're so much better at showing the context of what happened. Often the text description was wrong and/or wildly incomplete and/or full of assumptions the user made about how things work or what's going on, and the video would demonstrate the issue and allow me to not have to engage in a lengthy back-and-forth conversation trying to understand the situation. > “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an adage many would agree with. I do too, but until now, I had never read that the other way around, that a picture might cost a thousand words. ;)

banana_giraffe 5y ago

My favorite version of this trope is a video of a computer screen taken from a poorly held phone. Bonus points if the video is in portrait, cropping off important bits of text. Sure, not everyone's comfortable with a computer, and they think they're clever with a solution. I still get annoyed when I get one of these videos.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Don't forget that the image will also be in HEVC format and will be >5MB.

bluedino 5y ago

There was a vendor we had, they used the free version of a popular screen recorder for ALL their support tasks. Put in a ticket asking how to do something? They sent you a link to a very slow-moving screencast of going in and turning an option on/off or configuring a setting. No audio! Their knowledge base articles were just a collection of links to screen recordings! It was so annoying. Guess what happened when that company shut the free version of their app down...

GuB-42 5y ago

But which well-written sentences? If you do a minimum of testing, bugs often depend on context. For example, in case of a UI bug, maybe the user zoomed in, maybe he is using a non-default font, maybe he is using a different locale, maybe he did some action without realizing it (ex: scrolling, resizing the window), maybe the time is incorrect, etc... "I click that button and it crashed" isn't going to help you there, you know it doesn't crash, you use that button all the time... If it is as straightforward as it looks, watching that 3 minute video is your punishment for not testing. Yes, I know, I don't test either, but don't blame the reporter for it.

TonyTrapp 5y ago
I agree that a video can provide more context than text does. However, most videos I have received as bug reports in the past failed to do that. I just saw the user doing random stuff leading to random events. I'd say that often the most important thing to have is actually not a well-written bug report or a well-made video, but rather having access to the user's settings file and logs (if that exists for the application), as they often contain the explanation of why you don't see what the user sees.

wingerlang 5y ago

I love video reports, even bad videos since you can just ask for clarification and usually they point out what they were trying to show and you get the context from the video. I like it so much that I've considered implementing always-on screen recording in our QA debug builds.

no-dr-onboard 5y ago

Sounds like you work at H1 :)