it's all about reproducability. "it's broken", "it doesn't work" emails are so infuriating for that reason: "i'd love to help you, but i just *can't*!" it's not as if we're going to go around the ship pulling random ropes and punching holes through the hull to fix bugs by brute force...

i mean that can be part of a test suite, but that's a different thing.

also: TDD. i wish i discovered unit tests when i started programming (well, to be fair, they barely existed at all). i feel that a lot of the bugs i find are just some stupid mistakes i made that could have been caught with proper tests. it also helps clever devs (who, yes, even then, can't always file proper bug reports) help you reproduce issues properly.

but yeah, sitting next to the person is awesome. the folks at Freeswitch often just call people on the phone or invite them in a phone conference as  compromise. :)