TL;DR

A good report of a software issue should look like this:

• What is the initial position of your system? What operating system are you on? What versions of your OS and of the software under question were used? Is there any other software like previous versions that might affect behaviour?
• What exactly did you do? How did you install the software? Which dependencies did you install and how did you do it? How were you trying to use the software? Be specific! What commands did you execute? What files did you use?
• What did you expect to happen? Why did you think the former?
• What happened instead? Provide all output the software is providing.

Why is this important?

As a maintainer of a software, I sometimes receive issues reported by users. However, most users fail in their first attempt to provide a good issue report. A typical query I experience might look like this

Dear Sir,

I tried to use your software but it did not work. I did the commands in the readme, but there were errors. Please help!

I think it should become pretty clear that this query does not give me any possibility to provide help. Try to put yourself in my place: How would you help this user? I need to reproduce the issue to understand what is going wrong and to fix it. In other words: I need the user's help to help them!

With complex software and operating systems these days, there are a trillion things that could go wrong when trying to use a software. In order to provide help and narrow down the issue, users should provide as much information as possible. Please keep in mind the proposed structure at the beginning of this article if you happen to seek help on a software that you are trying to use.