An Agile way of reporting bugs
I have seen a lot of times that when I report bugs for a product that we are building, the developers don’t really understand the problem. Some bugs are so subtle and some so complicated that it takes an essay and half a dozen annotated screenshots to cover them. And even then I get “So what’s the problem, I have no idea what you’re talking about” from developers. Reporting bugs clearly, so that the person who’s supposed to fix it understands it completely without doubts is not trivial. So I resorted to a more vivid representation – short movies with live screen-captures and voice. And suddenly the daunting task of writing an essay and seemingly endless capturing of screenshots and annotating them vanished. If you haven’t guessed it yet, I use Jing http://www.jingproject.com to do just that. Jing sits as an icon atop all windows and it takes just two clicks to start recording the screen. It produces an .swf file – occupying as less space as possible. I promptly attach it to the issue I create in the bug-tracker.
I have found remarkable success with this. The developers are happy and so am I.
I too found it very easy reproducing a bug using movie with providing information of steps. It helps especially in distributed projects. But I use tool called Wink.
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/