Note To Clients: Please Tell Me More Than “It’s broken!”

Ever have that one client who says “it’s broken” and can’t give you any more information than that?

I’ve been there.

Before I get into it, let me put a disclaimer out there:

I’m not calling anyone out. I’m not specifying that this happened recently or even a particular client who does this. I’m just writing this as a general thought.

Ok, that’s dispensed with (so the angry emails will be held at bay)…

Clients, we know the frustration you have when something doesn’t work. We sense it, and we experience it ourselves. And often, when something fails, there’s a nifty error message or something that comes along and says “hey, this didn’t work right. Here’s where it broke.” That’s useful information.

I know that it can be frustrating when you try something, or are testing something, and it fails. But that’s ok – we’ll fix it. We just need to know how.

Some simple ideas for how you, our client, can help us:

• Take a screen shot (Google it if you need instructions). Email it to us.
• Copy and paste the error message right into an email.
• Try again. Record exactly what you do, and tell us exactly what you did that created the error so we can recreate it.
• Have patience that we hate bugs as much as you do, and we’re working hard to fix them.

With custom anything, mistakes happen. Our job – to fix those mistakes as quickly as possible. And the more you tell me about the error, the faster I can fix it.

Thanks for understanding.

Brandon Savage is the author of Mastering Object Oriented PHP and Practical Design Patterns in PHP

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