Troubleshooting in 5 “Simple” Steps

I recently talked with my coworkers about strategies for troubleshooting. We were focused on how to troubleshoot issues while chatting with our users, but I wanted to start with a basic workflow for troubleshooting bugs in any support medium. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Understand the problem from the user’s perspective
2. Determine if it is expected behavior or a bug
3. Search for previous reports of the bug or discussion of the feature
4. Test to see if the bug is reproducible
5. Report the bug in the appropriate place

I feel pretty good about that workflow, in terms of describing how you can identify and report a bug. As soon as you start considering the rest of the support picture, though, it gets more complicated.

Here’s a rough flowchart I just sketched out that takes into account the larger context:

I like how that flowchart encompasses not only what to do while troubleshooting a bug, but also some ideas for how to handle non-bugs — and what to do about the user who’s still stuck even after you identify and report a bug. Because let’s be honest, some bugs aren’t going to get fixed, or the fixes might take a while, and we’d still like to help those users get to where they want to go. I guess that’s a more holistic view of troubleshooting, beyond being a bug collector. 🙂