LabVIEW Bug Reporting
This article describes the process required for reporting bugs in LabVIEW.
Requirements of a Good Bug Report
Good bug reports should always include the following:
- Steps to reproduce
- What happened
- What you expected to happened
This information is needed to confirm that what you are seeing is actually a bug and to help figure out what is causing the buggy behavior. It is also a great idea to include any example code that demonstrates the bug and/or screenshots of the bug.
Reporting Bugs to National Instruments
If you have a bug to report to NI, go to http://ni.com/ask to submit a support request. Select Reporting a Bug for your Question Type.
If you select Phone or E-mail NI, and you have a valid service contract, you will be routed to Applications Engineers who can file the appropriate bug report. If you do not have a valid service contract, you should select Phone NI and you will be routed to an intermediary person who can pass you through to an Applications Engineer, provided you are calling to report a bug.
If your bug is in fact a bug, ask for a CAR Number -- this is how your bug is uniquely identified and can be used to track its status. When you get a CAR Number you should update your posting in the Bug Lists forum to include this CAR Number.
Posting a Bug Report on the LAVA Forums
There is a Bug Lists forum on LAVA. This should be used for reporting confirmed bugs with a CAR Number. If a posting in the Bug Lists forum is determined to not be a bug, it will be moved into another forum. Also, you can use the LabVIEW General discussion forum to discuss the issue with other LAVA members before creating a more official posting in the Bug Lists forum.
Bug report topics should be titled with a short description of the bug. The description of the topic should be used for status and CAR Number. For example, see the "Move on disk" feature crashes LabVIEW bug. Notice how it has a clear title and description:
- Title: "Move on disk" feature crashes LabVIEW
- Description: Status: Filed with NI support (CAR #4da9pok8)
Linking to Your Bug Report on the Monthly Bug Thread
In order to give NI visibility into your bug, you should post a link to it on the Monthly Bug thread in the Breakpoint forum on ni.com. NI's support engineers use this to create an index of all publicly reported bugs and will use this index to provide the community with updates when the status of a bug changes.
The easiest way to find the latest Monthly Bug thread is to look at this search results page. The latest thread should be at the top of the search results list.