How do you handle a non-reproducible customer reported bug?

Question

Every now and then, a customer reports an issue that's not reproducible. There's a back and forth of emails to try and understand the issue, but all details provided don't help the investigation at all. What's frustrating is that this is only happening to this one customer.How does your support and development team handle this?

troydavis · Accepted Answer

In the very rare event that no amount of additional instrumentation can yield an exception or extra visibility.. having the customer share or record their screen, depending on how reproducible it is for the customer.I&rsquo;ve only needed to do this a few times and I think all but one was customer error/misunderstanding, not bug. If you haven&rsquo;t already, send them a screen recording of how it should work (rather than just a text or voice explanation) and ask them to confirm that theirs is actually different.

eschneider · Answer

If you've got a good idea of what the customer is experiencing (logs/descriptions/whatever you can get for info), using the source code work backwards from whatever code could generate the state the customer described to determine how it got there. At some point you'll probably come across some bit that looks weird and that's quite possibly the problem.It can be a bit of work, and it presupposes a certain understanding of the system in question, but one can absolutely do this. It's basically my day job.

yourstartupguy · Answer

At one point, this doesn't scale and leaves a rather "incompetent" image of your team on the customer (if that customer understands a bit of tech). It's hard to find a problem if you don't know what to look for.Integrate better error logging and reporting systems like Sentry, LogRocket; both in backend and client side. This particular case gives me to hints to look for data specific to this user.

seattle_spring · Answer

Add more logging.