Raising Issues

Bug severity

Critical: Anything that prevents using the product to produce an accurate diagnosis, including data loss or false negatives in filtering, crashes in critical workflows without workarounds.

Normal: Bugs or crashes with workarounds (eg false positives)

Minor: Cosmetic issues such as spelling, badly aligned text, visual glitches

How to raise a good bug:

• Look to see if the bug has already been raised
• State upfront what goal you are trying to achieve at the highest level, it may be possible that we can give you a workaround, or what you think is wrong may be caused by something else.
• Provide the URL for the page with the error (so we know what environment the error occurred on)
• Provide minimal step by step instructions on how to recreate an error.
• List what you expect the result to be, vs what the result is
• Screenshots are invaluable for visual problems

Bad: My analysis returned a different number of results than I expected.

Good: My analysis at https://variantgrid.com/analysis/42 is returning the wrong results in the bottom right phenotype node. I expected this filter to return 10 results because…. but it is returning 12 results. I believe the variants X, Y are false positives.

---

Random advice:

• Stating your overall goal (vs what you think you need to do) is so often a source of problems it has its own name - the “X, Y problem” - “You're trying to do X, and you thought of solution Y. So you're asking about solution Y, without even mentioning X. The problem is, there might be a better solution, but we can't know that unless you describe what X is.”
• It’s possible we may be aware of an issue, but have misjudged how severe it is. For instance, we knew a job was rarely crashing, but figured the results would have been thrown away. We later found out that the bad results were being cached, which means the bad result came up again and again. Adding this new information means the bug is upgraded from a medium to a high, and thus will be fixed much more urgently.
• Please spend at least 30 seconds trying to see whether the issue has already been raised, the best way to do this is search open issues with keywords, and a few synonyms. We can merge issues together if we notice they are duplicates, though this adds to our overhead.
• Please don’t close issues that are assigned to others, even if you think the issue has been resolved/a workaround has been given. They may be leaving it open to prevent the issue reoccurring, eg fixing other environments, making the code more robust, or tweaking the documentation to prevent confusion. You can always ask them with @username whether it’s ok to close or assign the issue to you to close after you’re ok with testing.