Dear James, Amir and fellow wikimedia devs,
I understand your concern and I am not suggesting that we should force a
user to enter all Bugzilla fields but add those 5 questions as a guideline
in the free-text form. Reporters can use it when they feel uncertain what
information we are looking for but they are not forced to stick to any
format in particular.
Additionally, I think that Mediawiki users are as technological advanced as
Firefox users so I don't think this will scare somebody away. If we really
want to make it easier for people to file a bug then we should add a simple
wizard to guide them through the process. In particular choosing the right
product and component can be quite confusing / intimidating for somebody new
to Medawiki.
On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:43 PM, James Alexander
<jalexander(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
On 2/13/2011 8:46 PM, Diederik van Liere wrote:
I think we can draw some inspiration from
Mozilla's use of Bugzilla and
particular the format they are encourage users when submitting a
bugreport:
1) Steps to reproduce
2) Expected result
3) Actual result
4) Reproducible (by bugreporter): always / sometimes
5) Version information, extensions installed, database used (this
information is dependent on the skill level of the bugreporter and maybe
we
can add make this information easily retrievable
if it's current not easy
to
determine.
So maybe we can paste these 5 steps (or something similar) in the initial
form used to file a bugreport.
This would increase the quality of bugreports and make it easier for bug
triaging.
I can totally understand the idea behind this but I think Amir brings up
the concern about this best:
On 2/13/2011 5:56 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
bugzilla.wikimedia.org is the tracker where i
report more bugs than
elsewhere. The second is
bugzilla.mozilla.org . It's not because
Firefox has less bugs (quite the contrary!) but because Mozilla's
tracker requires me to fill more fields, such as steps for
reproduction. This may encourage detailed reporting that helps
developers solve the bugs, but it may also discourage people from
reporting them in the first place.
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Gathering all that information on a bug report form could quite clearly
make it easier to reproduce bugs and may make resolving them easier but
I worry that the harder and/or more complicated we make the reporting
the more likely we are to scare someone away from taking the time to
file the bug (which we want). I'm not totally sure where the best
balance there is.
--
James Alexander
Associate Community Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Jalexander(a)wikimedia.org
+1-415-839-6885 x6716
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