Steps to reproduce

Steps to reproduce are a recipe. Followed exactly, on a comparable environment, they should produce the same wrong behaviour every time.

Good steps start from a known state ("from a logged-out homepage"), are numbered, contain one action each, and end with the observed result. Bad steps assume context the reader does not have.

Asking for them as a separate field rather than burying the request in a description placeholder measurably improves what you get, because the form is doing the remembering rather than the reporter.

Why it matters

A bug that cannot be reproduced cannot be verified as fixed. Steps are what make a fix provable rather than hopeful.