We have talked about a type of writing that every developer should be able to do: API documentation. I claim there is something else that every developer should be able to write: a bug report.

A good bug report, of course, gives the reader enough information to diagnose and fix the problem. The reader is (presumably) someone who is an active developer on the project and understands the project's functionality, but not the nature of the bug or what caused it. For more tips, see Mozilla's bug writing guidelines.

For this exercise, find two existing bug reports and rewrite them so they give a good summary of the problem so the developers can start to fix them.

Have a look down the discussion on the bugs, which will give you an idea of information that wasn't included in the original report. While re-writing, you may have to make up some details that were missing: feel free to do so in a reasonable way.

As usual, it would be best to pick a technology you know a little bit about, so you can understand the context. Some possibilities:

• Ubuntu bugs
• Android issues list
• Rails issues
• Boost bugs
• any GitHub repository's “issues” page, like Bootstrap issues, Docker issues, gulp issues

You can also feel free to look at the “closed” issues: the things that have been fixed will definitely have complete context.

Submitting

Save/export your work as a PDF. Submit the file to the CourSys activity Exercise 8.