Well, I’m sure if you give us an unlimited amount of time we can get you the exact minimum repro steps necessary to consistently reproduce this bug. However, after a reasonable attempt, we can’t figure them out. What do we do? Here is what I think…

Always err on the side of logging too many bugs. Log your best repro steps guess, any other conditions that may be relevant, and add a note that the bug is only triggered sometimes. If the right dev gets the right clues she may be able to crack it. If not, we can resolve it to a “No Repro” status and hope more information will lead to its resolution later. On a previous project we resolved these as “Phantom Bugs”, which seemed kind of fun to me.

I’ve noticed great value in the ability to reference a phantom bug with a BugID. Bugs without IDs are not really bugs. Instead, they just get vague names and eventually become lost in a sea of email threads that morph into other issues.

What do you think?