I just came across three nice articles on bug reports, how they are filed by customers, and what all customers (including programmers who are customers of others) can do to increase the likelihood of their bug being addressed. Luckily, I generally get good bug reports, and when they aren't, it's usually my fault (e.g. I currently get crash reports for the Moose, but I have no way to let users tell me what they were doing at the time, or to specify their e-mail address so I can ask them for more info). Anyway, on to the articles:

Most of these articles also have great comments. The Executive summary of them all would probably be: Remember to state your problem that you're trying to solve, not just how you'd change the program to solve it. The programmer might just be able to surprise you and solve your problem with a much better solution.

Also, make sure your bug report covers the following three points in detail:

  1. What you did. In the form of actual menu item choices and what button was clicked, e.g. "Double-clicked my image file's icon in Finder", not as a short summary like "I opened a file". However, do also include an additional higher-level summary of what you were trying to do, like "I created a PDF image and wanted to put it on the web. For this I wanted to run it through Frobnitz to defrobnicate the file prior to uploading it."
  2. What happened. In detail. Not "it didn't work" or "it disappeared", but rather "the application Frobnitz's windows disappeared from the dock and a window showed up 'the application Frobnitz unexpectedly crashed...'". And always try to quote error messages verbatim. Sometimes a program has several error messages that differ in one word only, and if the programmer knows the exact text, they can find the spot in their code where it actually crashed.
  3. What you expected to happen instead.

 

Update: Added a link to Daniel Jalkut's entry on the topic.