Making a Bug Report More Persuasive

Created and summarized by Brian Marick.

While working on the AbiTest project, Danny Faught discovered this bug in the AbiWord word processor:

Abort when reading an empty file

Version: 0.7.6
Platform: All
Severity: Normal

If I tell AbiWord to read an empty file on startup or using File->Open
after startup, AbiWord aborts. Reading the special file /dev/null is
sufficient to reproduce the bug on Linux. The output on Linux 2.2.10
(SuSE 6.2) is:

/usr/local/bin/abiword: line 32: 1335 Segmentation fault (core
dumped) $ABISUITE_HOME/bin/AbiWord_d "$@"

On Windows NT 4.0 SP4, the output after reading an empty file is:

An application error has occurred
And an application error log is being generated

AbiWord.exe
Exception: access violation (0xc0000005), Address (0x0042d870)

This error was identical when I reproduced the bug a second time under
NT.

I thought this was a good bug report, except for one thing: the failure is too easily dismissed as unimportant. AbiWord uses XML as its file format. If you save a completely empty AbiWord document, the file on disk looks like this:

<!-- ===================================================================== -->
<!-- This file is an AbiWord document. -->
<!-- AbiWord is a free, Open Source word processor. -->
<!-- You may obtain more information about AbiWord at www.abisource.com -->
<!-- You should not edit this file by hand. -->
<!-- ===================================================================== -->

<!-- Build_ID = (none) -->
<!-- Build_Version = 0.7.6 -->
<!-- Build_Options = LicensedTrademarks:On Debug:Off -->
<!-- Build_Target = /Builds/AbiBldSvr/0940446998/tmp/abi-0.7.6/src/WIN32_4.0_i386_OBJ/obj -->
<!-- Build_CompileTime = 14:30:34 -->
<!-- Build_CompileDate = Oct 20 1999 -->

<abiword version="0.7.6">
<section>
<p></p>
</section>
</abiword>

So a developer reading the bug report might say, "But AbiWord doesn't ever create empty files. So this won't happen in real life."

What the developer would have overlooked is that people can use AbiWord to edit ordinary text files. So I suggested making the bug report more persuasive by starting it this way:

Suppose someone is using Abiword as a replacement for Notepad. They decide to open a text file, say "firewall-warning-log.txt". Suppose that file is empty. AbiWord crashes in the following way...

This dramatizes the bug in a way that makes it more likely to be assigned the priority it deserves.

Related Testing Craft Pages

• There's more about bugs in the index of techniques.
• By shifting the focus from just any empty file to a specific file that might plausibly be both empty and edited, I did one kind of failure improvement. Danny's original bug report is the result of other kinds.

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