I Started Writing the Support Reply Before I Wrote the Bug Fix

I had a habit of fixing the bug and then writing the reply. The reply was always short. The bug was fixed, what else

was there to say.

Then I started writing the reply first. Explaining what broke, why it broke, what I was doing about it, and when they would know it was fixed.

The replies got longer. The bugs got fixed faster. Writing the explanation forced me to understand the problem before I tried to solve it. The half-formed ideas did not survive the act of putting them into words for someone else.

What would change if you had to explain the thing before you fixed it?