On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:56 AM, Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
10 minutes is a long time for something that may not help. Multiply that by say 8-10 open source applications you are interested in, and you see why it's not worth the effort.
Again, look at it from the user's point of view, please! It's all about triage. Triage is a cruel and brutal thing, when you define it, but either you 1) Leave it alone and you're done. i.e. workaround or adapt to the program 2) spend time on stuff that can be helped and 3) abandon the hopeless cases.
More stuff falls in the 1 and 3 categories than you realize. When 7 or 8 core apps are buggy, you can't afford to report bugs unless it's really simple, convenient, and possibly even enjoyable (i.e. satisfaction of making a difference). Have you ever got the "Report this error to Microsoft" dialog box? That's what I'm talking about.
So you say we have thousands of users per developer. Great! The user should be able to email or whatever saying: xyz is crashing when I view the records. It means almost nothing to the dev, but if he gets 999 others that say exactly the same thing, it means the view records routine is horribly broken. On the other hand, if he gets 5 others, and notices they're all from non-latin alphabet countries, the dev is in the best position to put those pieces together. The DEV can make a bugzilla record. Maybe in another case he gets 5 others and one of those gives him good detail. He's on the trail, and the DEV can create a bugzilla record to track it.
Instead what usually happens is the instant any individual report comes in the dev starts shouting about how the user should use bugzilla (yet another application, another big learning curve, and yet another registration on the net), expecting every user to be a developer or professional-grade QA tester too.
That makes the triage for the user easy; 3) dump the program.
Hi,
(personal opinions)
ext Mark Haury wrote:
> Michael Wiktowy wrote:
>> TANSTAAFL
>> Expecting someone to put the bit of effort into detailing their
>> problems is the smallest price to pay to have them fixed.
>>
>> Bug tracking software allows the developers to be a lot more efficient
>> at staying on top of diagnosing issues than juggling a bunch of
>> unstructured, vague, ranty emails. The fact that you have to do some
>> email validation/registration process (similar to signing up for a
>> mailing list) and you can't just reply back to the bug tracker via
>> email is an unfortunate consequence of our spam-infested Internet.
>>
> It may seem reasonable if you only consider a single bug in a single
> application, but that's not the real world scenario. What is actually
> happening is that the developers have the easy side of the bugzilla
> process, and they're only dealing with the one bugzilla, while the
> average user is dealing with bugs from a bunch of different apps at
> once. Don't try and tell me that's not valid.
Submitting a bugzilla report shouldn't take more than 10 minutes
10 minutes is a long time for something that may not help. Multiply that by say 8-10 open source applications you are interested in, and you see why it's not worth the effort.
whereas developer may spend hours trying to reproduce an issue.
Usually there are only couple of developers, whereas users come
in thousands. Open Source developers do the work free because they
want to help others besides themselves. You do the math about which
side should spend the bug reporting effort.
Again, look at it from the user's point of view, please! It's all about triage. Triage is a cruel and brutal thing, when you define it, but either you 1) Leave it alone and you're done. i.e. workaround or adapt to the program 2) spend time on stuff that can be helped and 3) abandon the hopeless cases.
More stuff falls in the 1 and 3 categories than you realize. When 7 or 8 core apps are buggy, you can't afford to report bugs unless it's really simple, convenient, and possibly even enjoyable (i.e. satisfaction of making a difference). Have you ever got the "Report this error to Microsoft" dialog box? That's what I'm talking about.
If you go to effort of reporting the bug and actually reply questions
on how the developers might be able to reproduce it, so that they
can start investigating how to fix it, that shows that you actually
care about the issue and that it's real.
So you say we have thousands of users per developer. Great! The user should be able to email or whatever saying: xyz is crashing when I view the records. It means almost nothing to the dev, but if he gets 999 others that say exactly the same thing, it means the view records routine is horribly broken. On the other hand, if he gets 5 others, and notices they're all from non-latin alphabet countries, the dev is in the best position to put those pieces together. The DEV can make a bugzilla record. Maybe in another case he gets 5 others and one of those gives him good detail. He's on the trail, and the DEV can create a bugzilla record to track it.
Instead what usually happens is the instant any individual report comes in the dev starts shouting about how the user should use bugzilla (yet another application, another big learning curve, and yet another registration on the net), expecting every user to be a developer or professional-grade QA tester too.
That makes the triage for the user easy; 3) dump the program.
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