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Report Better Bugs

This page covers some tips and tricks that will help your beta testers create the most efficient bug reports.

Our goal is to minimize the time required to fix a bug. A huge factor that affects this objective is the quality of the report sent.

How to Report Bugs with Instabug

Invoke

To report a bug, you can simply shake the device and Instabug will be invoked. The default invocation event is shaking. However, this can be changed by the developers to become a floating button, screenshot capturing, swiping or even a custom button.

Report a Bug

Instabug offers three different modes "Talk to us", "Feedback", and "Report a bug". Once the SDK is invoked a popup appears so that the user picks what they want to do. If only one of them is enabled, the popup doesn't appear and the enabled mode will start right away. In the case of bug reporting being the only enabled mode, then the next thing the user sees when the SDK is invoked is the screenshot page.

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Report Categories

If presented with a list of categories your issue might be related to, select the one that best describes the issue you’re reporting. This helps developers categories and act on the feedback they get more easily.
Note that this step is not enabled by default, so depending on the app you’re testing, you might not always see those options.

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Annotate

When the SDK is invoked on the feedback or bug reporting mode, a screenshot of the application is automatically captured. It’s a good practice to annotate screenshots of the bugs you send to bring the attention of the team behind the app to what the bug is. Use the drawing tool to draw shapes, or the magnifier to zoom into parts of the screen that aren’t visible. Also, don’t forget to hide any sensitive data using the blur tool.

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Report Details

The next page is where you can type in some information and description about the bug. First, you need to enter your email to help the developers get in touch in case they have some questions and then you can add any description that may be helpful to the developer. It is up to the developer to decide whether those fields are required or optional. Apart from what you send, we attach all the steps that your performed starting from launching the app till the SDK was invoked.

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Tags

In case you are doing internal testing and the one reporting the bug already knows who is the one who should investigate the problem. You can add a tag to the report by typing #your_tag by the end of the description text. This tag can later be used to automatically assign the report to the correct developer as explained here.

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Screen Recording

You can also add attachments other than the default screenshot. You can add a video recording. If you tap on the screen recording button, the red button in the following image will appear. You can then navigate freely within the application. Once you decide to start the screen recording, tap on the red button.

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Once you start the screen recording, an audio recording button will appear on the screen so that you can add an audio recording as well.

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Extra Screenshots

You can also send extra screenshots with the report. The screenshot can be picked from your gallery or a screenshot from the application. To capture an extra screenshot, tap on the camera button, you can then navigate freely to the view you want to capture and then tap the capture button.

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Communicate

One last step is to maintain a 2-way communication channel with the team working on the app. They may need to get back to you for a follow-up. What you reported may have inspired a new idea or raised new questions. They will definitely need to get back to you for feedback. This step is also very easy. Whenever you receive a new reply from the team, an in-app notification will pop up and you can reply back to them through the application.

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To conclude, a detailed report will always speed up the fixing process. Instabug already sends a lot of data with each report as the device attributes, user attributes, user steps, network logs and the view hierarchy. However, the tester's final touch can make the process way easier.

Relevant APIs

For more details about how to implement any of the mentioned features, you can check the following links.
1. Invocation Events:
iOS, Android, React Native, Xamarin, and Cordova.
2. Tags:
iOS, Android, React Native, and Xamarin.
3. Required fields:
iOS, Android, React Native, Xamarin. and Cordova.