Lesson 12 / الدرس 12
A bug report is a request for someone's time / تقرير الخطأ طلبٌ لوقت أحدهم
The bug you found is worth nothing until somebody fixes it, and whether they fix it depends almost entirely on how much work your report saved them. This is the lesson that decides whether you are useful to a team.
الخطأ الذي وجدته لا يساوي شيئًا حتى يصلحه أحد، وأن يصلحه يتوقف كلَّه تقريبًا على مقدار ما وفّره تقريرك عليه من عمل. وهذا هو الدرس الذي يقرر: أنافع أنت لفريق أم لا؟
A developer opening your report has a queue behind it. Every question your report leaves unanswered — which browser, what did you type, what did you expect instead — is a message they have to send and a day they have to wait. Reports that are cheap to act on get acted on. Reports that are expensive get moved to the bottom, and then closed as stale six weeks later, and the bug ships.
The three questions, always
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What did you do? Numbered steps from a known starting point, with the data in them. This is the next lesson, and it is the hard part. ماذا فعلت؟ خطوات مرقّمة من نقطة بداية معلومة، والبيانات فيها. وهذا هو الدرس التالي، وهو الجزء الصعب.
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What happened? Exactly what you saw, in the words the screen used. Not your interpretation of it — the thing itself. ماذا حدث؟ ما رأيته بالضبط، بالكلمات التي استعملتها الشاشة. لا تفسيرك له — بل الشيء نفسه.
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What did you expect? The half most often left out, and the one that makes the report a bug rather than an observation. Without it you have described behaviour and left someone else to decide whether it is wrong. وماذا توقعت؟ وهو النصف الأكثر إغفالًا، والذي يجعل التقرير خطأً لا ملاحظة. فبدونه تكون قد وصفت سلوكًا وتركت لغيرك أن يقرر: أهو خاطئ؟
The title is the whole report, to most readers
| Weak title | Usable title |
|---|---|
| Login broken | Sign in accepts a wrong password for accounts created today |
| Bug in checkout | Checkout charges twice if Place order is pressed while the page is loading |
| Arabic problem | Arabic names save correctly but display reversed on the orders list |
| Doesn't work on mobile | Basket total is cut off below 360px, so the amount is unreadable |
A good title says what happens and where. Most people in the project will read only this line — in a list of forty — and decide from it whether the bug is theirs and whether it is urgent.
<h3>Sign in accepts a wrong password for accounts created today</h3>
<p><strong>Environment:</strong> Chrome 141, Windows 11, staging, 09:15</p>
<h4>Steps</h4>
<ol>
<li>Create an account with test-0819@example.com / Passw0rd!</li>
<li>Sign out</li>
<li>Sign in with test-0819@example.com / totallywrong</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Happened:</strong> signed in, /dashboard opened.</p>
<p><strong>Expected:</strong> stay on /sign-in with
"Email or password is incorrect".</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong> accounts older than a day behave correctly.
Reproduced 3 of 3 times.</p>Try it live / جرّب بنفسك
Check yourself / اختبر نفسك
1. Which part of a bug report is most often left out?
Testers write what happened because they just watched it. The expectation lives only in their head — and without it the report describes behaviour and leaves someone else to judge whether it is a bug at all.
2. Why should a report cover only one bug?
A report is a unit of work. Five bugs in one cannot be given to one person or finished in one change, and it stays open on the strength of whichever of the five nobody took — which is how real bugs get lost inside reports that are technically still active.
3. Which title is most useful in a list of forty bugs?
It says what happens and where, so a reader scanning the list knows immediately whether it is theirs and how bad it is. The others require opening the report to learn anything at all.
Score / النتيجة: 0 / 3
Your task / مهمتك
Write a complete bug report for something genuinely wrong that you can find — on this site, or anywhere. If you truly cannot find a bug, report the weakest error message you met instead, and say why it is a defect.
اكتب تقرير خطأ كاملًا لشيء خاطئ فعلًا تستطيع إيجاده — في هذا الموقع أو في أي مكان. وإن لم تجد خطأً حقًا، فأبلغ عن أضعف رسالة خطأ لقيتها، وقل لماذا هي عيب.
- A title saying what happens and where, readable on its own عنوان يقول ماذا يحدث وأين، مقروء بذاته
- Numbered steps, what happened, and what you expected — all three خطوات مرقّمة، وماذا حدث، وماذا توقعت — الثلاثة جميعًا
- The environment: browser, device, and when البيئة: المتصفح والجهاز والوقت
- Exactly one bug خطأ واحد بالضبط