Skepticism is a virtue (Bug Monday)
You've probably got someone on your team actively monitoring for errors on your CRM system (and if you don't, we really should talk).
Still, sometimes you'll get a report from a user who's running into a problem.
Maybe they can't submit a payment. Maybe they're seeing something unexpected.
What to do?
A frustrated donor or member is a real problem. It's important to take them at their word.
But you can lose a lot of time and effort trying to solve this problem without a careful approach.
Here's where I like to remind people:
A little skepticism can be a virtue.
After all, how do you know what's causing this user's problem?
Is it a bug in your software?
Is it a misconfiguration somewhere?
Is the user missing an important step?
To address it properly, the skeptical mind assumes that there nothing to fix, until you (or someone on your team) can see it happening.
Without seeing it happen, you really have no idea if:
The problem exists,
For whom it exists and under what circumstances, or
What the nature of it really is.
You can guess and assume, but that wastes a lot of time.
Here’s the thing:
Someone on your team needs to replicate the bug. Otherwise, you don’t have a bug; you have a rumor.
Once you can see it happening you get a few advantages:
The cause of the problem may be obvious to you, so you can fix it right away.
If not, you now have a set of steps that you can repeat in slightly different scenarios. This is critical for deeper debugging.
Most importantly, you have a way to verify that any corrective action you take has actually solved the problem. Because you’ll be able to repeat those steps without issue.
Sometimes figuring out how to replicate the problem is 99% of fixing it.
But this only happens if you start with a little bit of healthy skepticism.
All the best,
A.
P.S. This email is part of a series, “Bug Monday”. Every Monday I’ll cover important concepts in dealing with real or imagined bugs in your CRM system. You can see previous emails in this series here.)