Reproduce the Issue

Testing and fixing bugs happen at various stages during the software development process. The testing at each step is more extensive than in the previous step and is supposed to catch issues missed previously. However, all this testing will inevitably miss some issues the customer will encounter. This reality is more pronounced for on-premises products, and cloud products are only partially immune to this. The reason is that in both flavors of software, the customer's environment is always different from where the development and testing have taken place.

Advantages of reproducing bugs internally

Debugging issues seen in a developer's or QA's (internal) setup is always easier than in the customer's environment. If the bug associated with a particular use case or workflow is readily reproducible in a developer's setup or environment, we have the following advantages:

• A use case is usually associated with a higher-level API call or a function, so we immediately know the code path to suspect. If the logs need to be telling more, we can add as many as needed. The code can be modified without worrying about any adverse side effects (something we can do only in an in-house/local environment) and sometimes even attach a debugger. Therefore, a reproduced issue in-house can give us all the leverage we need to go after it.