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@wikimedia.orgwrote:
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:
- Steps to reproduce
- Expected result
- Actual result
- Reproducible (by bugreporter): always / sometimes
- 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. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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@wikimedia.org +1-415-839-6885 x6716
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