Maybe i am not expressing myself clear, i am not talking about adding checkboxes, radiobuttons or pulldown menus, I am saying that we could add the following text to the textarea field which contains the actual bugreport: "Please describe the steps to take to reproduce the problem:" "What is the expected result:" "What is the actual result:"
"If you know which version you are using or you have other information that you think might be helpful please add it as well. You can also describe the problem in your own words and not sticking to the abovementioned questions."
So, again I am not saying we should add fields, we could add this text as the default text in the textarea so people have a bit more guidance when writing a bugreport. No hard checks, nothing is mandatory.
On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
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.
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