Mostly excerpted from Mozilla, edited.
further reading: smart-questions
Writing precise steps to reproduce bug
How can a developer reproduce the bug on their own computer?
- If you have precise steps to reproduce the bug — great! — you're on your way to creating a useful bug report.
- If you can reproduce occasionally, but not after following specific steps, you must provide additional information for the bug to be useful.
- If you can't reproduce the problem, there's probably no use in reporting it, unless you provide unique information about its occurrence.
What should you include in a bug report?
- Indicate whether you can reproduce the bug at will, occasionally, or not at all.
- Describe your method of interacting with the browser in addition to the intent of each step.
Good (precise) example
1. Start Firefox by clicking on the desktop icon
2. Press Cmd+N (or Ctrl+N for Windows users) to open a new browser window
3. Paste https://mail.google.com/ in the address bar and press Enter
Bad (imprecise) example
Open Gmail in another window
- After your steps, precisely describe the observed (actual) result and the expected result. Clearly separate facts (observations) from speculations.
Good (precise) example
Expected results: My inbox displays correctly.
Actual results: My inbox displays the message 'Your browser does not support cookies (error -91)'.
Bad (imprecise) example
"It doesn't work" "Page displays incorrectly"
Providing additional information
Basically, please tell us which browser (including the version number) you are using and which platform you are on.
Good example
Chrome 49, Windows 10
Perfect example (provides the whole UserAgent)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.221 Safari/537.36 SE 2.X MetaSr 1.0