Bugs in websites

23 Oct 2017

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Reporting a bug in free software is easy. It turns out that everything I thought I knew about bug reporting was turned on its head when I tried to report a bug in the Tesco groceries website.

I was finding some sort of JavaScript problems in that my CPU was held at 100% and the page wasn’t really usable.

I don't know what @Tesco have done to their website, but it's crawling and crashing on my machine with 16 cores and 24 GB RAM.
— @irl@57n.org (@iainlearmonth) October 21, 2017

As with bug reports, I was expecting to at least have some technical information logged along with my email address so someone can contact me if they want me to try some things out. What I actually got:

Hi Iain, I would like to log your feedback for our IT team, could you please DM your full name, address and postcode? Thanks - Dani
— Tesco (@Tesco) October 22, 2017

Hmm. No. These are not standard fields in bugzilla.

In the end Tesco logged my bug report “anonymously”, claiming something about data protection as the reason.

Hi Iain, without completing data protection, we're unable to log this against your account or check for account errors. TY - Kelly.
— Tesco (@Tesco) October 23, 2017

I haven’t checked today if the issue is solved, but I have been using Tesco’s groceries website without issue for years now, so hopefully this is temporary.

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