How to handle unreproducible bugs

Did you ever find yourself in this position - a bug is reported by the client but you are unable to reproduce the bug. Even the QA team is unable to reproduce the bug. We are facing such a situation with our desktop application(C#,开发者_如何学Python windows forms). What do you suggest we should do to reproduce the bug, or track the scenario which generates the bug.

Yes, this is a common situation.

I find that the best way to handle this situation is to log as much as possible in log files and get the customer to send the log files to you for analysis, as well as their description of what they were doing when the problem occurred. The customer description is often very incomplete and misses out important details about what they were doing when the error happened. A detailed log can help fill out the holes in the story.

If you are lucky enough that the log file includes a stack trace it is often possible to reason about possible causes of the error even if it is a rarely occuring bug that you have not been able to reproduce yourself. In this situation a code review of the affected code can reveal flaws in the design of the code and suggest an alternative approach that is less likely to fail.

This all dependes on what kind of bug you are facing (Logic, User Interface, Multi Threaded, Or actual User).

• Ensure that the client has given you all the required info to reproduce the bug.
• If at all possible, have the client show you how to reproduce the bug, or at the least send some screen shots of how it was done.
• Ensure that you write some Unit Test to try and cover the bug, try proving that it is there.