Building a mobile application consists of endless iterations of improvements and enhancements. The trigger for those additions and changes can be inspired in different ways. At the top of the list are 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.
In this article, you can find the key functions in Instabug's Bug Reporting & Feedback:
Showing Instabug With Different Methods
Exploring Report Types
Using Report Categories
Reporting A Bug/Feedback From the SDK
Accessing Your Reports on the Instabug Dashboard
Looking Into The Report Details
Taking Action on The Report
Replying to Reporters
Forwarding Your Reports With Integrated Tools
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 to 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 will appear so that the users can 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 them 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, debugging time is cut down. 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 users' actions on each screen they visited and 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 on 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 causes a certain UI view to be 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:
Console Logs: Capturing all console logs and displaying them on your dashboard.
Instabug Logs: Capturing logs that are similar to NSLog() and print(), but they have the added benefit of having different verbosity levels.
Network Logs: Track all network requests performed by your app; Request details, along with their responses.
User Events: Logging custom user events throughout your application, and they will automatically be included with each report
User Steps: Track each step a user has taken from 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 Action on The Report
Updating and Assigning
Manage issues by updating their status and priority and assigning reports to any team member with 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 many 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, and feature requests.