The Art of the Vague Ticket: A Field Guide to Bad Bug Reports
The ticket arrives in your queue at 9:17 AM on a Tuesday. It reads: "It broke." There is no further description. The priority is marked "Critical." The reporter is listed as someone named Dave who works in Sales and has been at the company for eleven years. This is not an unusual ticket. This is a Tuesday. Welcome to the art of the vague ticket — a distinct literary form with its own conventions, subgenres, and interpretive challenges.
The Classic: "It's Not Working"
"It's not working" is the haiku of bug reports. Short. Elegant. Completely devoid of actionable information. What is "it"? What is "working" supposed to look like? What is it doing instead of working? On what device, in what browser, under what conditions, for which user? The classic "it's not working" ticket requires you to respond with a series of questions before any investigation can begin. The response to your questions will arrive two to four business days later and will consist of two words: "still broken."
The Epic: "This Has Always Been a Problem"
The scope of "this has always been a problem" is breathtaking. You are now responsible not merely for fixing a current issue but for a historical pattern of failures that have apparently been accumulating since before your employment. The ticket provides no specific instances, no reproduction steps, no timeline. It does convey, with remarkable efficiency, a generalized organizational frustration that predates you personally. The correct response is to ask for a specific recent example and work backwards from there.
The Impressionist: "Sometimes It Glitches"
"Sometimes it glitches" is a masterpiece of atmospheric ambiguity. "Sometimes" — under what conditions? After lunch? On Tuesdays? Only when Saturn is in retrograde? "Glitches" — what kind of glitch? A visual glitch? A functional glitch? An audio glitch? Does data persist? Does the session end? Is the glitch reproducible? Can you reproduce it right now? The Impressionist ticket captures a feeling of vague wrongness without committing to any specific wrong thing, leaving you to paint the picture from scratch.
The Surrealist: A Screenshot of the Wrong Screen
The surrealist ticket includes a screenshot. The screenshot is of the reporter's desktop, with thirteen browser tabs open, one of which might contain the relevant application. The error, if visible, is in a window that is 40% occluded by a Word document. The cursor is hovering over a menu that has nothing to do with the reported issue. The screenshot was taken on a laptop with a resolution that was last considered adequate in 2008. The filename is "screenshot.png" and this is the third ticket this week that contains a file with that name.
How to Write a Bug Report That People Will Actually Use
The antidote to the vague ticket is specific enough to feel almost tedious: what were you trying to do, what did you do step by step, what did you expect to happen, what actually happened, and what are you using (device, browser, version, OS). That's it. Five things. They take two minutes to write and save hours of back-and-forth. The best bug reporters in any organization are deeply respected by their engineering colleagues, not because they're right more often, but because their tickets can actually be acted upon. Clear communication is a technical skill, even when you're not writing code.
For more on IT communication culture, read our guide to explaining technical things and our look at rubber duck debugging.