Show HN: BugCam: Add Video to Your Bug Reports

I used to attach video to bug reports occasionally. All the developers on my team hated it. They forced me to stop.

They found it slower than scanning through text and didn't like the lack of copy + paste ability. Also I think they liked the ability to read the tickets directly from email, on mobile, etc.

That may have been specific to the type of work we were doing. I'm interested to know if you tested the video-based bug tracking concept with development teams using existing (more cumbersome) tools, before building a targeted solution.

I was loving this until I saw the pricing and noticed that it's priced on number of bug video creators. Boo. I was hoping that this would be used by our customers (for customer support) so that they can report an error simply in video without having to write it out.

When the folks from TimZon, then Snap-a-Bug, and now SnapEngage had a browser-based video for snapping bugs, I was thrilled, but they exited that space and pivoted. I'm still looking for something that our customers can use to report bugs more intuitively with video. Any ideas? I don't think BugCam fits the bill given the need to download and the per-creator pricing.

Hi there. Yes, given that it's a Windows app, it's not designed (at this point) for end users to submit bugs, but instead for professional testers, developers, and product managers

You may want to check out ScreenR for Business: http://business.screenr.com/

I think it's exactly what you're looking for.

The good folks at Balsamiq are using it. See here: http://support.balsamiq.com/

Searchable. Indexable. Easily migrated across technology stacks. Compressable. Light-weight. Machine readable. All things that video is not.

This is not the future of bug reporting.

Hmm... maybe not the future but useful part of the process? Like screenshots, only at 10fps and with audio!?

Sure, quite useful.

Let's say a tester has some fairly complicated steps to repro a particularly nasty bug. So complex that writing down the steps correctly would take perhaps a half an hour. So they use the super useful feature of their bug report system to make a video of the repro steps. Shortly thereafter the bug is handed off to a dev. who quickly fixes it.

Meanwhile, the tester spent that extra 30 minutes being productive, finding bugs they wouldn't have had time to before and increasing the quality of the product overall.

Then 3 months later a checkin causes the bug to regress. And a different tester in a different team files a different bug report. Since the repro steps aren't searchable (being in video form) it's not easy to determine that this bug is a duplicate of the older bug, or that it's even a regression at all instead of a newly discovered bug. The bug then gets handed off to a different dev. who fixes it. Now you've saved 30 minutes of time for one tester but you've taken away who knows how many hours of tester time, triage (or release or management) team time, and developer time.

Repeat ad infinitum.

Video repros are useful, and they save effort, but perhaps they come at a cost that shouldn't be ignored.

What does this add over http://screenr.com/ (which works 100% in the browser on all platforms)?

The key difference is that BugCam integrates directly with leading bug tracking tools. So in a couple of clicks, you can record a bug video, and create a new case/issue that includes the video.

We opted to create a native desktop app (Windows only, for now), because we had more control over the user experience. For example, our "window picker" UI lets you mouse over the windows on your desktop to highlight the one that you want to record. Hard to do with a JAVA-based app that doesn't have access to the Win32 API.

We hope that folks will install BugCam and let it hang out in the system tray to be used (for free), every so often. Again, native Windows app best for this, we think.

I think this is awesome, especially for those "Hey, watch this cool thing I broke" kind of bugs. And for all of those bugs that live in Mr./Ms. CLOSED-CANNOT-REPRODUCE's component. :)

I still think clearly-written steps to reproduce win all because it's still so much faster for most Developers & QA folks to process and understand.

But for that phenomenal bug that you want to show off, BugCam would be killer.

(Disclaimer: In my eight years as a tester, I've added video to a bug exactly once: for a wickedly reproducible kernel panic that did the craziest colorful blinking ascii light show full of ☺s, ♦s, and ♣s. Man, that was lovely - wish I still had it around!)

Why do you host your screencast on the landing page on Vimeo?

It feels kind of wrong that a company that integrates video into web bug trackers needs to host their own video on a 3rd party video hoster.

Just because it was easier! Our servers are setup for hosting bug videos, not Adobe Premiere-edited product videos.

Sure, we could have copied the product video onto our servers, rejiggered our video player to play it, etc., but it's not worth it, IMO. I (the product guy), didn't want to waste any dev time whatsoever on our home page video.

(P.S. - what happened to all the web-based video editing tools!? Remember JayCut? Anyone else like them around and available)

Nicely done. I was looking at screencasting software and I saw a competitor of yours doing this too - recording problems for user support. Theirs used java, so there's nothing to download. I thought I saw some code floating around for Flash that did the same thing.

Incidentally, over at StartupGuild, I was lamenting on how much yakshaving it takes between writing the code and actually having a functioning SAAS. How much time did you have to spend on generic tasks like payments, membership, access control?

Thanks! Yes, it can be done with JAVA, but we weren't happy with the required UI compromises of a non-native app.

I was sure we would be able to do this with Flash or Silverlight, but A) of course I had reservations about both platforms and B) it turned out that it wasn't so easy to do.

RE: time spent. Payments by Spreedly, which was a snap. Membership / access control came easily given our experience with previous products.

The real time killer was the installation process and testing the app across WinXP, Vista, Win 7, 32 bit, 64 bit, etc. Sometimes I wonder if we're the only folks around doing Windows desktop apps!

We used Microsoft's ClickOnce for the installation. The app silently auto-updates itself. You can click "About" to see what version you're running. It'll install the latest version if one exists. Getting this all to work right was a ton of work, but we wanted a really clean and simple install experience, and I think we achieved it. We had to deal with registration-free COM, created a bootstrapper that downloaded .NET Framework 3.5 if you're running Windows XP and happen not to have it, etc.

I'm doing SL work at the moment. I didn't think Silverlight would be capable of desktop capture, unless you run out of browser(?).

What's on your server stack?

ClickOnce is nice. I use join.me and its clickonce onboarding experience is impeccable.

Since you are targetting internal users .NET 3.5 isn't going to be an issue with your customers.

ps. I saw your project list. Wow. You are prolific.

Thanks! Prolific!? I dunno... :-)

Actually we're targeting .NET 3.0, but, see, Win XP has no installer for 3.5 (apparently) and so we have to check if users have .NET 3.0 and if they don't, then prompt them to install 3.5. sigh Next app will be 100% web based, I think!

Server is Windows and IIS. Pretty standard stuff.

I've never heard of Join.me but I will check it out. "impeccable" is usually not used to describe onboarding of Windows apps! P.S. I'm a super-happy long-time LogMeIn user (hundreds of machines at one point using it).

I love this. But when I click "Pricing" in the footer, I get a (cute) 404 page.

Oops! Looking at this now!

Ahh, Pricing page loads if you're signed in. Up until today, this page was only visible to signed-in beta users (and not the public). Testing a fix on staging NOW.

OK, Fixed!

I would prefer a multi-os, non-intrusive solution like http://business.screenr.com/ except for it's price for small startups which is enterprisey

Please see the above comment I made in reply to the same question. Would you mind elaborating: when you say non-intrusive, what do you mean?

I'm sure he means installing a native client on the OS. Using a tool like this internally is fine, but really, something like this shines in the hands of the end-user.

A developer can more than adequately explain what the bug is and where it is in a few sentences. A user, on the other hand, will simply say "this doesn't work" which is unbelievably unhelpful. Having the user submit a video of the problem would solve that problem splendidly.

However, I don't want to make my users install a program on their system and frankly, they're not going to want to either. A non-intrusive solution would be great.

Ahh, yes, I agree, WRT end users submitting bugs. Requiring a download + install (even though we do it as cleanly and simply as possible, I think) is probably a non-starter. Our initial focus is professional testers and developers.

Very cool. Small suggestion: Make the cursor turn into a hand (button:hover{cursor:pointer;}) when hovering over the buttons on the pricing page.

Oops! This is related to the Pricing page issue we had this morning. The buttons aren't enabled for non-logged-in users. Working on a fix now, thanks!

OK, fixed. Thanks again!

Why is there a 1 minute limit for the video? I tried it and it just stopped recording after 1 minute.

BugCam is the perfect tool for software developers as well as testers. Truly awesome!

Oscar Henry

Thanks Henry!

(P.S. - Henry is an early beta tester, provided lots of great feedback that was incorporated into the product).

Wow... this is really cool. I like how it integrates with bug trackers.

Thanks Charles. Tell Greg to use it over at Zumbox! :-)

www.jingproject.com can also be used for this purpose. You'll capture a screenshot or video, click on a button and get a url back.

setup.exe? That's not going to run on my Mac!

Sorry, Windows only at this point.

You should then put a user-agent test so that you start the download only on Windows computers. I have no use for a .exe either.

Good suggestion, thanks! Added it to the list: http://getsatisfaction.com/bugcam/topics/check_that_user_is_...

Nicely done!