One of success factors in rolling out new IT systems is to make sure that bugs are identified and fixed quickly to minimise the impact to the business.

However there are a few key challenges to doing that

• users are frustrated
  • on reporting the bugs and explaining it to the IT team
  • their feedback are not acknowledged
• the IT team spends a lot of time
  • understanding what the bug reported is about
  • gathering additional details for them to identify the bug
• the bugs raised are not tracked and fixes
  • the programmer forgot to log the bug from the phone calls/emails
• a lot of time is spent on clarifying the bugs instead of fixing them

That’s why I was impressed by a company whose IT department took the initiative to insert a “Give feedback” link under their help menu for all their systems. By clicking on it, a window will pop up for the user to key in his idea/bug report. And then the feedback will be emailed back to the system administrator.

According to them, they wanted to help the end-users to give feedback to them to improve the system.

Atlassian’s Bonfire gave me an idea to refine this bug reporting process for web-based applications

1. User identifies a bug
2. User click the button on their browser
3. A snapshot of the current screen is taken
4. User marks out the error and key in a short description of their feedback
   
5. When the user click on the send button, the bug is logged directly to the bug-tracker
6. The system details and the time of error are also captured automatically
7. The bug will appear in the activity stream of their IT team’s dashboard
8. The IT manager will be able to have the latest statistics and status on the bug reported via JIRA