Bug triaging (Was: Nebraska Team Plans Fiesty Fest!)

[nik butler]

> Not really, as you say, you dupe or you comment. Personally I always
> subscribe to the bug too, lots of people subscribed to the bug may
> make it stand out to developers. The problem with 'me too' comments
> are that they are unnecessary after a while and just results in lots
> of pointless emails being sent out, slowing people down further.
The thing about the community though is that there are hidden accepted
behaviors, established only after observing, so there are many many many
more potential valuable contributions we can miss because its not
obvious how to become  involved. It wouldn't occur to me that
subscribing to a bug would make it stand out more to a developer. Pretty
much every user who experiences a bug may have a particular time
constraint to their reporting of it so possibly being able to see and
agree with a previous report may help them commit to reporting it. I
certainly wouldn't expect to generate extra noise on emails through
peolpe adding comment. Tes the 'me toos ' are not ideal and when I see a
bug that has been reported , for instance today when Synergy was not
working well, I want to know how often and how consistent this bug is
experienced but more important to me the user is that I know someone who
can and is able to fix it will be looking at fixing it.[1]

>
>> As for Thursday nights and bug testing I wonder if its a crazy idea to
>> suggest user attempt to replicate malone bug reports. Some mechanism
>> that enables another user to see a bug and commit to replicating its
>> effects
>
> Ideally a bug report contains the necessary reproduction steps, one
> useful thing can be to work those steps out. I think the work flow
> currently is to assign the bug to yourself while triaging it, though
> I'm not sure on this point.
Well I know Alan Pope is keen to look at getting more involved from a
developer perspective and my own experiences in bug reporting have been
varied and mixed. Certainly Mark Shuttleworth talked about the need to
make Bug Reports easier to report upstream.  However with my own
developer hat on I can clearly remember the frustration in receiving bug
reports which had not been re-validated by a Q+A department in order to
prove that the bug existed and that it was related to Configuration,
Process or Application.

>
> Yeah, way off-topic :p I've CC'd the bugsquad too, perhaps the
> discussion should continue there.
Cheers I didnt know about this list until now so consider me Subscribed.
and nudge me to add Bug reporting to our ukteam agenda , cheers Dean.



Nik


[1] Here im speaking with my classic end user hat on so consider it a
devils advocate position.