Good newbie instructions for creating minimal complete bug examples?

Question

So, those of us who've been answering questions and dealing with bug reports for a while are all deeply familiar with the concept of a "complete, minimal example". You start with a gnarly huge pile of code that's got a weird error, and you want to ask someone about it. But you don't want to send them the whole mess, so you start cutting the pile of code down into smaller pieces, until you get this little crystalized 20-line gem that still has the same bug you started with.

(And then, at least half the time, you realize what the bug is because it's staring you in the face like a luna moth, and you don't have to ask after all. But that's a side effect.)

Doing that sort of code-reduction isn't a skill that everyone has -- it takes a bit of practice, beyond the fact that a lot of newbies haven't yet learned that they ought to do it in the first place. There are several excellent sets of instructions for newbies on how to ask good questions (e.g., ESR's classic "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"). Are there good instructions out there that explain what exactly a minimal complete example is, and how and why to create them?

Answer 1

I'll start this off with the ones I'm familiar with; these both come out of the TeX community, and so are a little oblique for programming. I'm hoping other people have better answers.

The UK TeX FAQ has an entry on "How to create a minimal example" at http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=minxampl.

That page points to a somewhat longer article on "What is a minimal working example?", here: http://www.minimalbeispiel.de/mini-en.html. Again, this is for TeX documents; the ideas are the same, but the tools and details a little different.