On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Diederik van Liere dvanliere@gmail.comwrote:
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.
I'm not questioning your experiences in development overall, but in the
specific context of Wikimedia I've found a big pile o'bugs through user intervention. With New Page Triage/New Pages Feed alone, 16 bugs and enhancements were identified in the first 24 hours, all from non-technical editors. That number has continued to grow - again, from non-technical users.
If we direct them to other support channels, the bug *still* has to end up in bugzilla. The only difference is we're relying on developers, technical users, the bugmeister and others to constantly monitor and look at a plethora of channels and report things, which'll suck in their time and add another link to the chain. Every time you add relays, data gets lost.