Hi Following from experience with the recent Fedora Bugzilla mass-triage, I figured that I would write a few words about the state of bugs in open source projects, and where people's perception can tend to fall short of reality. [Some of you will recognize where it's largely plagiarized from] OSS developers assume that because there is not a dedicated paid testing team hidden within the walls of a particular contracting company, that there are infinite testing resources. Instead, just as with proprietary software, the resources are finite, the amount of hours in a day are finite, and the fact is that most of bug reporters are contributing to an OSS community in their spare time, not being paid to do it full-time. In fact the overwhelming majority of users is pretty happy to rant on discussion forums and mailing lists and let software authors go fish for problems themselves, rather than expend the time and energy to push report through "proper" channels. In fact, it is debatable that the number of OSS bug reporters is growing faster than the number of OSS code authors. Given these resource limitations, bug reporters have to be selective in their reporting. The volume of code and the number of problems to report is literally more than they can handle. In order to handle the workload, they filter ruthlessly. If a project takes months to answer a bug report, or repeatedly asks to retest or confirm a problem no one has looked at still exists, that's unlikely to get as much attention as a project that is quick to process reports and does not make reporters feel they're wasting their time. I'm not saying that this is good, bad, or indifferent, but simply a fact of life in the open source world. In conclusion, the open source bug reporting community is very happy to help projects better their software. However, the people that produce problem reports are very much inundated with issues that should be reported. What does this mean to you, the bug handlers? That we'd like for you to understand that every problem is not going to be reported in a perfect way, and simply asking reporters to work more on reports is not a guarantee that they will do it. In fact most of them will just report their activity to channels where the bar is set lower, and the cost/benefits ratio is better for them. The only reward for reporting issues is having them handled. When handling is poor this ratio gets very bad quickly. There are humans the other side of the channel too. -- Nicolas Mailhot -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
