Martijn is on to something here. I write as a non-developer who has
identified bugs and has been pressed to report them via Bugzilla, despite
the fact that I feel very much out of my depth there. For those of us who
can report problems but not solve them (other than to test solutions), a
simpler process would probably help to ensure that the bugs are reported in
a more standard way that is most likely to be useful to the developer team.
On a side note, Bugzilla is also used not just to report bugs but to
request enhancements and/or activation of extensions. This can be the
developer equivalent of walking through a field of landmines, as many are
not familiar enough with the disparate communities to determine whether
this is actually a community request or just a bunch of guys on a
little-watched page asking for something. The communities can get pretty
nasty with the developer team if an unexpected change is made, so finding a
better way to resolve these issues would be mutually beneficial.
Risker/Anne
On 14 May 2012 12:07, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thats actually quite an interesting thought, and it
could well be
true, even if it is the opposite of the Wiki philosophy.
On the other hand, it might also be true that non-developers do find
bugs, but fail to report them exactly because of the BZ user
experience. It's quite important that reporters don't 'get in the way'
of development. Keeping them out of the devolopers shouldn't be done
by erecting walls of artificial difficulties - which is what BZ'ed
user experience is, it hides the difficulty of finding and properly
reporting a bug in itself behind the difficulty of going through the
technical process of reporting a bug.
How it should be done is a more difficult question though. Hardly
anyone equipped to do proper triage from the firehose of a
low-boundries bugtracker is interested in actually doing that triage
(see also: code review)
On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 5:46 PM, Diederik van Liere <dvanliere(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I don't think we should aim to cater to
non-developers at all. The
changes that a non-developer finds a real bug are very
very small (in my
previous life as an academic I have done a lot of research on Bugzilla and
developer productivity and it's based on that experience that I am making
this statement). I think that if a newbie / non-developer finds bugzilla
then he /she should be redirected to either IRC / Teahouse / Talk pages /
FAQ or any other support channel that we have. They can always be send back
to file a bug report.
If we are going to spend effort on improving bugzilla then it should be
focused
(IMHO) on matching a bug with the right developer (right meaning a
person who can actually fix the problem). It is this area that Bugzilla (or
any other bug tracker AFAIK) provides very limited support.
-- Diederik
On 2012-05-14, at 1:10 AM, Ryan Lane wrote:
>> I don't think you'll ever find a finished bug-/issue-tracking solution
that
>> caters just as well for newbies and
developers. The main reason is (of
>> course?) that most issue tracking software is written for developers,
by
>> developers with little or no experience
or thought as to what makes a
good
>> end-user experience. Also, most issue
tracking tools are *made
>> deliberately* to work best for developers - with human (end-user)
>> interaction kept to a minimum. That's also why most issue tracking
>> solutions end up looking like glorified (not the good kind)
spreadsheets
>> (Mantis, Flyspray, others?), something
the IRS would want you to fill
out
>> (BZ, OTRS, RT, others?), or some kind of
bastard child in-between (The
Bug
Genie, Redmine, Jira, Fogbugz, others?).
I'd like to go one step further. There is not a single good bug/issue
tracking system in existence. Yes, I'm completely serious too. I've
come to believe that it's impossible to make one that anyone will be
happy with. That includes most developers of tracking systems too
(I've written one, and I hated it, though I liked it better than what
I was using before).
We can complain about this till the end of time. This discussion is
even worse than bikeshedding discussions. At least with bikeshedding
discussions you end up with a color for the bikeshed. When discussing
bug/issue trackers you just end up with the same tracker, or another
crappy tracker.
- Ryan
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