Our most complex AUT has no shortage of production bugs. They’re discovered almost daily and our support team forwards them to the rest of the team. These bugs get reported with little factual detail and it’s up to a BA, Dev, or Tester to figure out the repro steps.

Our informal process is, the first person to reply saying “I’m on it” owns the issue and gets to be the hero who figures it out. Determining the elusive repro steps combines many skills; interviewing oracles, listening to users, acting like users, pulling audit trails from the DB using SQL, examining artifacts like user screen captures and error log files, and tracking down user stories or requirements.

Last week one of my testers stopped by my cube, grinning ear-to-ear, and said “I’m so excited! I just figured out the repro steps!” (to a really really challenging prod bug). She sent her repro steps out to the team, they were correct, and within minutes she was thanked and declared a rock star by various team members.

Determining the exact minimum repro steps, is there anything more exciting for a tester?

…well, hopefully. But cracking repro steps is pretty darn exciting!