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Bug Reporting and Feedback
Introducing Instabug Bug Reporting and Feedback
Introducing Instabug Bug Reporting and Feedback

Dive deep into the bug and feedback reporting product and all of its features.

Moataz avatar
Written by Moataz
Updated over a week ago

Building a mobile application consists of endless iterations of improvements and enhancements. The trigger for those additions and changes can be inspired by different ways. At the top of the list: user feedback and fixing bugs in previous iterations. With Instabug’s bug reporting and feedback, you can cut your workflow from hours to minutes by receiving rich reports that help you fix issues faster and build a better app.

Here is a quick video showing you the product in action:

In this article, you can find the key functions in Instabug's Bug Reporting & Feedback:

  1. Showing Instabug With Different Methods

  2. Exploring Report Types

  3. Using Report Categories

  4. Reporting A Bug/Feedback From the SDK

  5. Accessing Your Reports on Instabug Dashboard

  6. Looking Into The Report Details

  7. Taking Actions on The Report

  8. Replying to Reporters

  9. Forwarding Your Reports With Integrated Tools

  10. Automating Your Workflow With Rules

Showing Instabug With Different Methods

Users can share feedback from your Settings menu, or trigger Instabug by shaking their device, taking a screenshot, or other gestures.
Here is how to customize the showing methods that fit your app's experience flow.

Exploring Report Types

Instabug offers three different modes for users to either report a bug, suggest an improvement, or just ask a question. Once the SDK is invoked a popup appears so that the users pick what they want to do. Here is how to customize the options.
If only one of them is enabled, the popup doesn't appear and the enabled mode will start right away. If bug reporting is the only enabled mode, then the next thing the user sees when the SDK is invoked is the screenshot page. 

Using Report Categories

Use Report Categories to organize your feedback and customize them to fit your needs by allowing users to select from predefined categories. This helps you categorize and act on the feedback you get more easily. Note that this step is not enabled by default, Here is how to configure it.

Reporting a Bug/Feedback From the SDK

Your users can add a description, annotate the attached screenshot, magnify, or blur out sensitive information. They can even add more attachments or add a screen video recording to effectively pinpoint the issue, and if you are using the Instabug SDK for testing, you can enable the Extended Bug Report to help structure your bug reports. 

Accessing Your Reports on Instabug Dashboard

Once users submit a feedback report, you’ll get your reports instantly and track it from your dashboard.

Your reports will be labeled by their type and you can filter them by type, app version, categories, tags, and much more.

Looking Into The Report Details

With every report, you can get a quick overview showing the attached feedback and essential details including default, or custom user attributes.

Repro Steps

With Repro steps cut down on debugging time. Easily check all of the interactions a user makes with your app up until a bug/feedback is reported. Reproduce the issue by seeing the user’s actions on each screen they visited up to sending the bug report. Here you can find all the events that get logged data and how to disable/enable this feature.

Session Profiler

With the session profiler you can identify device related issues at a glance. Device details such as CPU load, memory, storage, connectivity, battery, and orientation are highlighted 60 seconds prior to the report.
Here you can find the data breakdown and how to disable/enable this feature.

View Hierarchy

One important category of reported bugs is UI problems. Here comes the importance of the View Hierarchy. As an example, you might receive a bug that a certain UI view is missing. The first thing you will need to know is if the view is hidden behind a higher layer, out of the parent view's bounds or missing from the window.

View Hierarchy is disabled by default. If you need to enable View Hierarchy, here is how to enable it.

Report Logs

Multiple logs provide a breadth of contextual data, and help you highlight and solve specific issues. Here are the types of logs that are sent with the bug/feedback report:

  1. Console Logs: Capturing all console logs and displays them on your dashboard.

  2. Instabug Logs: Capturing logs that are similar to NSLog() and print(), but they have the added benefit of having different verbosity levels. 

  3. Network Logs: Tracking all network requests performed by your app; Requests details, along with their responses.

  4. User Events: Logging custom user events throughout your application and they will automatically be included with each report

  5. User Steps: Tracking each step a user has taken since the beginning of the session until a report is sent. 

Need to deep dive? Here is our technical guide for it.

Tags

You can add custom tags to your bug reports right from the dashboard or from the SDK. These tags can later be used to filter reports or set custom rules from your dashboard.

Taking Actions on The Report

Updating and Assigning 

Manage issues by updating their status, priority, and assigning reports to any team member who has access to the application. All those parameters can later be used to filter bug reports

Activity and Comments

You and your team members can leave comments on the bug reports. You can also mention a member by typing a @ before the name or tag another bug report by typing a # before the report number.

Replying to Reporters

If you want to let your users know that a fix is on the way or ask for more details. You can do this by reaching out to them directly from the bug report in your dashboard using the Reply to User button. You can include saved replies, action buttons, or attachments. Once you send them a message, they receive an in-app notification. They can check your message and reply back from within your app.

Forwarding Your Reports With Integrated Tools

If your team is used to certain tools, you can forward all the data you get on the dashboard to them. You will have the same detailed issues that you get on your Instabug dashboard forwarded over there. We support a variety of tools like Slack, JIRA, Zendesk, Github, Zapier and much more. For more details about the integrations, check the following link.

Automating Your Workflow With Rules

With Rules you can optimize your workflow even further and automate most of the actions. Set automatic replies to users, forward issues directly to your chosen tools, and much more.

Conclusion

You can start using Instabug SDK simply by adding one line of code to your application. Here is how to integrate the Instabug SDK.

Related Articles

After you learn about bug reporting, you might want to check out crash reporting, app performance monitoring, in-app surveys, app insights, and feature requests.

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