When one of my devs asked me to repro a bug on his box because he didn't know how to execute my repro steps, I didn't think twice. But I was a little surprised when he stated his position that he was strongly in favor of QA always performing the repro steps on the developer's box instead of the developer doing it themself. He argued the devs didn't always have time to go through time consuming or complex repro steps. He attempted to retract portions of his statement once he found out I was blogging it...too late.

I should, however, add that this particular dev has been tremendously helpful to me in setting up tests and helping me understand their results.

That being said, I've never heard anything like this from a developer in all my years of testing and I think it's ridiculous. But it did make me think about how we speak to our devs via bug reports. When we log repro steps from blackbox tests we use a kind of domain specific language that requires a user-based understanding of the AUT. To perform a repro step like "Build an alternate invoice", one must understand all the micro steps required to build the alternate invoice and one may have to understand what an alternate invoice is in the first place. If the next repro step is "Release the invoice to SystemX", one must know how to release the invoice, etc.

I think it is realistic to expect developers to have an understanding of this business-centric language as well as knowing how to perform said procedures from the AUT. And in general, time spent learning and using the AUT will help the developers improve it's overall quality.

Am I right?