DD - Bugs

Hey everyone! Today, I’m going to talk about one of the unfortunate realities of any piece of software: bugs. We want our platform to be the best that it can be, so we really appreciate when our clients let us know when they’ve found issues. Bugs are frustrating, so I want to discuss a bit of the process that goes on behind the scenes when you report a bug to our customer success team.

The first step to fixing any bug is to figure out exactly what’s wrong. The most helpful thing that you can do for us is to provide us with as much detail as possible about the issue you’re seeing. For instance, bug reports saying something like “my items are broken” are much less useful than saying “the videos from my last EDGE import aren’t showing on the website.” If you provide us with as much detail as possible from the start, there’s a much lower chance that we have to reach back out for more information, which always slows down the process. Some helpful things that we almost always like to know are exactly what’s broken, where you’re seeing it, the time that you first noticed it, and the browser you’re using. We always prefer being given information that we don’t need rather than having to ask for more, so any detail you can think of is appreciated when submitting a bug report.

Once the bug is tracked down, we can determine the steps to fix it. Not all bugs are created equal – sometimes, it may be as simple as a quick update to a local file in your folder. Other times, we may have to rewrite entire parts of the platform (such as our recent debacle with Facebook’s API). We hope to solve most bugs within a week or two. If a bug looks to be especially challenging, our customer success team will reach out with a rough timeline of when we expect to be able to fix it.

Finally, once the development team has fixed the bug, we like to go through a round of testing to be sure that everything is looking good. Because there are so many variables to bug fixes, it’s actually pretty common for the bug to look fixed to the developer working on it, but still be broken for others, or for the bug fix to accidentally break other parts of the platform. To mitigate this, we go through a couple rounds of internal testing – first with other developers, then with our customer success team. Then, we’ll reach out to the client who reported the bug and ask them to test. If everything looks good, we release the fix platform-wide.

I hope this has been helpful! If you take one thing away from this post, it’s this: as much detail as possible when you report to us! It really helps us solve your issues as quickly as possible. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments!