How do I debug issues that I can't reproduce on my dev system?

Question

I have recently finished phase 1 of my Facebook game:

Rails Across Europe

It works fine on my dev system, but other people report errors and timeouts when they try to run it. Does anyone know how I would go about debugging these issues if they don't occur on my system?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Generally, you need to have traps in your application that record exceptions so that you have a trail to inspect when something goes wrong in the wild. You won't know what to try to repro until you have a specific exception/error.

Answer 2

The usual route is to use logging and error messages to pin down where the error is occuring in the code on production. Then look through it on your dev machine.

Added to this is getting as much info as you can from the people having problems, so that you can find out if it is a problem with particular client configurations.

Answer 3

A few things you can do

• Introduce additional logging in the area that appear to related to the issue
• Play the game itself, a lot ;-) from similar environments the users use in order to experience these issues first hand
• Collect info about the bug reports (try and see if they have some commonality such as same browser, same OS, same time of day...)