Often times, the developers will fix exactly what you report,without even realizing the problem is a more general problem that needs a more general fix. For example,
I may report that my word processor “save file” function failed and the word processor abended when I tried to save the file “myfile”.
A little more investigation may have revealed that this same failure occurs anytime I save a zero length file. Perhaps, on this release
it abends on every save to a remote disk, a read only disk, and so forth. To already know this when you write the report will save the developer a lot of time and enhance the possibility of a better fix to handle the general case.
When you detect a problem, take reasonable steps to determine if it is more general than is immediately obvious.
| Generalize Example | Defect Remark |
| Don’t: | Error message for "file not found" error has garbage characters for the file name. |
| Do: | Error message for "file not found" error has garbage characters for the file name. Every message I tried that expected data to be inserted in the message had the same problem. Messages without inserts were okay. |
