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Lessons · IT support · reproduce it first

Make it happen on purpose before you try to make it stop

Reproduce the fault: do exactly what the user did and watch it fail with your own eyes. A fault you can trigger is a fault you can test a theory against; a fault you have only heard about is a story.

Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.

What it is for

'The report crashes when I run it.' You spend an hour on the reporting server. Then you sit at the user's desk and watch: they run the report while the export from the previous run is still open, and the export locks the file. That is not a server fault. Ten seconds of watching would have saved the hour, and it would have let you say 'fixed' with proof instead of hope.

How to think about it

Ask for the exact steps, click by click, then do them yourself on their machine while they watch. If it fails, you have it. If it does not, try it as their account on another machine, and as another account on their machine: one of those tells you whether the fault follows the person or the box. Only once you can make it fail do you form the theory, because only then can you prove the fix by making it not fail.

Worked example

User: 'it crashes when I run the monthly report'
The story. True, and not enough.
Their steps: open the tool, pick March, click Run, wait
Click by click. This is what you will repeat.
Repeat on their machine: crash, with an error about a locked file
Reproduced. Now there is an error message, which the story did not have.
Repeat with last month's export closed: the report runs
The trigger is found by making it fail and then making it not fail. The fix is a sentence in the article, not a server rebuild.

Your turn

The fault will not reproduce on the user's machine under your account. Write the next thing to try.

Try it as their account on  machine

The trap

Declaring it fixed because it did not happen while you were watching. If you never made it fail, you cannot know you made it stop. Intermittent faults are the ones this rule exists for.

Practise reproduce it first on HoneA question on it now, a coding challenge where there is one, and it is remembered for review. Free, no email needed.