Re: [tdf-discuss] FreeDesktop Bugzilla

Hi Ben, all!

Just to add my 0.02 Euro Cent ... You mail fits very well to what I
would like to comment, therefore I picked "you".

Am Donnerstag, den 11.11.2010, 07:55 -0800 schrieb BRM: 
> ----- Original Message ----
>
> > From: Charles Marcus <CMarcus@Media-Brokers.com>
> > To: discuss@documentfoundation.org
> > Sent: Thu, November 11, 2010 10:29:53 AM
> > Subject: Re: [tdf-discuss] FreeDesktop Bugzilla
> >
> > On 2010-11-11 9:47 AM, Rainer Bielefeld wrote:
[comments about current bug tracker experience] 
> > 'Masses of users' will not know how to  properly report bugs.

On a Computer-Human Interaction conference in April this year, there has
been a very good talk discussing "how (plain) users report bugs". The
team analyzed the data of the Firefox bug tracker.

The interpretation leads to the following: "Many people reports bugs for
one time, only. They are usually less capable of providing more
information to developers - or better: the developers have to take care
to get these information. On the other hand, few people report a lot of
bug reports." This matches my personal experience.

There may be different and good reasons for users to participate in bug
reporting - but the best (non-automated) system won't be able to collect
that much information in a quality, that developers may simply start to
work on most of the issues. From what I've seen so far, only the
individual discussions on mailing lists or forums led to high-quality
bug reports right from the start. And this is why I think, the community
members on the mailing lists are incredibly helpful (maybe even
essential) for (more) efficient development.

However, there are other things we might improve to make it easier for
users to report issues ... but this belongs to another mailing list.


> > As I have advocated in the past (on this and the  OOo list), I would
> > suggest a two-tiered system - a simple bug reporting page  for end users,
> > where they can report bugs, document format/compatibility  problems and
> > feature requests. This page should simply require a validly  formatted
> > email address, and should not require the user to create an account  or
> > 'log in' to anything.
>
> Mozilla resolved the issue for Firefox/Thunderbird by having a multi-tier 
> system:
>
> 1. If you are reporting a feature request, then yes you need an account to their 
> bugzilla to enter it.
> 2. If you are reporting crashes, then Firefox/Thunderbird bring up a special 
> crash dialog for the user to enter what they were doing and any other comments 
> when the crash occurred; it then takes care of submitting things per process.

Concerning 1: In most cases, "classical" issue tracking or bug tracking
system will fail here. Therefore some discussion came up, how to collect
ideas and improvements within the community.

I'm currently unable to find the mail, so here is a link to what I
started quite some time ago:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Idea_Handling

Michael - in parallel - did already include that to the Drupal website
development stuff.
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website/Drupal/brainstorm


Concerning 2: The funny thing is, that a crash reporter is available in
OOo, and thus, should be available within LibO as well. But - as far as
I know - we don't have a server ready to receive and to interpret the
data. But we now have pretty skilled devs around ;-) If you never
experienced a crash (*g*), here is the spec how it looks like: 
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/errorreporter/error_report_2_0_ui_specification.odt


[...]

> And yes, I've submitted bugs to both projects and have gone through getting 
> accounts - it's really not that much of a hassle to do. If you really wanted to 
> make that less of a hassle, then integrate OpenID or something similar for the 
> bugzilla login [...]

As far as I know, one of the requirements / aims for the current website
development is a Single Sign-On system. It would be great if it could be
extended to support the issue-tracker, too.


Cheers,
Christoph


-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: Email to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived ***