How can I support the support department better?
language-agnostic
Solution
Technical features:
- In the error dialogue for a desktop app, include a clickable button that opens up and email, and attaches the stacktrace, and log, including system properties.
- On an error screen in a webapp, report a timestamp including nano-seconds and error code, pid, etc so server logs can be searched.
- Allow log levels to be dynamically changed at runtime. Having to restart your server to do this is a pain.
- Log as much detail about the environment in which you're executing as possible (probably on startup).
Non-technical:
- Provide a known issues section in your documentation. If this is a web page, then this correspond to a triaged bug list from your bug tracker.
- Depending on your audience, expose some kind of interface to your issue tracking.
- Again, depending on audience, provide some forum for the users to help each other.
- Usability solves problems before they are a problem. Sensible, non-scary error messages often allow a user to find the solution to their own problem.
Process:
- watch your logs. For a server side product, regular reviews of logs will be a good early warning sign for impending trouble. Make sure support knows when you think there is trouble ahead.
- allow time to write tools for the support department. These may start off as debugging tools for devs, become a window onto the internal state of the app for support, and even become power tools for future releases.
- allow some time for devs to spend with the support team; listening to customers on a support call, go out on site, etc. Make sure that the devs are not allowed to promise anything. Debrief the dev after doing this - there maybe feature ideas there.
- where appropriate provide user training. An impedence mismatch can cause the user to perceive problems with the software, rather than the user's mental model of the software.
Problem
With the best will in the world, whatever software you (and me) write will have some kind of defect in it. What can I do, as a developer, to make things easier for the support department (first line, through to third line, and development) to diagnose, workaround and fix problems that the user encounters. Notes - I'm expecting answers which are predominantly technical in nature, but I expect other answers to exist. - "Don't release bugs in your software" is a good answer, but I know that already.