I am a junior programmer, and one of my assignments is to maintain our company's website. Earlier this morning, someone in upper management messaged me saying he ran into a bug on the website. As I'm in charge of the website, our computer help team redirected him specifically to me; I am solely in charge of fixing this issue.
Unfortunately, I cannot repeat his bug (and believe me, I've tried a lot). Even more unfortunately, this manager works from a separate office, so I cannot see it either. The only avenue I can think of for getting a complete description of the issue is to ask him for details of the problem as I need them, and to occasionally bother him to test my prospective solutions.
The obvious problem here is that none of what I just suggested fits the manager's job description at all; he's not even vaguely in any tech sector. It's not that I think he wouldn't be able to help me debug this issue, it's that I think it would be a misuse of his time. I don't feel like it's appropriate to repeatedly ping an upper manager with questions and requests to try seemingly arbitrary behavior that might help a junior programmer find a bug.
On the other hand, I need to fix this issue. If this bug is taking place on other users' computers, it has to be fixed (it should only occur in a very specific environment, but when it does it's a showstopper). Even if it's only happening on his computer though, I still can't just tell him "I couldn't find that bug so I'm just not going to work on it, sorry."
Are there any tried-and-true techniques and strategies for getting help on an issue from someone above the issue's paygrade?
What I've done so far is:
Tried to get as complete a description as possible when he first let me know.
Only bothered him for information I think is absolutely essential to fixing the issue.
Tried to bundle up requests for more details so I'm not pinging him every few minutes.
As a note, I've never communicated with this manager before, so I'm especially wary of making a bad impression.