How do you handle bug reports that you can't reproduce locally?
by•
Trusting user reports is so hard when your local tests and staging environment show a completely green checkmark.
For the longest time I used to assume the user was doing something weird on their end only to find out weeks later it was a subtle race condition.
Once you finally spot one of those ghost bugs, it completely changes how you look at support tickets. Do you usually ask users for video recordings right away, or do you try reproducing it blind first?
5 views
Replies
Neither, I ask for the app's own record first. Every report in my app comes with the user id prefilled, and Settings has a Share Logs button that sends a plain text log of what the app did, including every tap by name. On the server, each run is one document with its error code. A recent one: a tester's song failed halfway with a bare "fetch failed". Nothing reproduced locally, and the same request worked minutes later. The logs showed a single dropped connection while polling the music engine, and one such drop ended the whole run. The fix was to retry the read only calls and never repeat a request that might already have been billed. A video would have shown a spinner and an error, the logs showed the cause.