Depends. We have gone through the "reporting process" with our customers numerous times. I have ZERO tolerance for someone who just says "Your program is not working" (to them it is a computer program). If they at least tell me what form they were in, what they were trying to do, what they saw, etc., then I will happily work with them if it is truly a problem. Otherwise, I handle it as an education issue and inform them why they can not do what they are trying to do.

I have battled one customer for 2 years who is running our software on a small network that we did not install. They were having intermittent yet severe problems on ONE workstation only, C...5 errors, failures reading/writing data from/to the server. The other stations worked flawlessly. I kept telling them they had a networking, OS or other hardware issues with that station. Of course their hardware tech kept blaming us (primarily because of the C...5 errors).

The tech finally figured out the problem was two-fold -- they were using an ancient printer on an XP machine whose printer drivers version ended around Win98 (source of the C...5 errors), plus the network cable had been strung directly across and lying on a flourescent light in the ceiling. They installed a new printer and re-routed the cable, and Voila! all their problems disappeared.

>Hi everybody,
>
>We discussed this issue with my colleague today on the way to work...
>
>I have no problems if somebody will tell me my software has bugs and demonstrate them to me. In fact, I appreciate this very much. Sometimes these bugs are really hard to reproduce, this would probably be exhausing...
>
>But I think lots of developers hate being told that their software has bugs. Instead of thanking and making a fix they would start to hate the person reporting them. I think, it's the wrong attitude.
>
>So, I'm curious, how do you personally take bug reports?
>
>Thanks.