In general, people are really bad at including a useful description when reporting a problem. People in technical fields should be good at this, especially people who are involved in software or product development, since bug tracking is a critical part of development.
I'm responsible for supporting some tools. It's amazing how often someone will report a problem, but not give any useful information. And they do it by phone! I hate receiving phone calls. I mean, sometimes it's appropriate, but I like email because it forces the person to write down a coherent thought. When they call you, they can just blather on endlessly without getting to the point.
A recent example was a phone message like this (almost verbatim): "Someone was having a problem accessing XYZ in the web pages." There is almost no useful information in there. Who is the someone? What web pages? What's the URL? I actually knew what the problem was immediately (that person didn't have permission), but couldn't actually solve the problem since I didn't know the URL and who it was. So I had to call back and get the correct information to fix the problem.
I love when someone includes all the relevant information. It does happen occasionally.
- schneid
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