2011/2/14 Diederik van Liere dvanliere@gmail.com:
I am not following this line of reasoning: how can adding guidance / instructions on how to write a good bug report turn people away?
It's very simple, really: a form with a lot of fields may turn people away. I know that it turns me away. How many people are like me in this regard? That is someone that should be studied.
I still do report bugs in Firefox, despite the many field in the form, but i can easily imagine people who won't.
In a previous life, I have studied the factors that shorten the time required to fix a big. Bugreports that contain steps to reproduce are a significant predictor to shorten the time to fix a bug. You can find the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1507233
That makes perfect sense, but that's the developer side side of the question. I'm talking about the user side.