Development decisions and user feedback

[Wouter Stomp]

Hello,

I was a bit surprised when I read this part of the log of the last
technical board meeting:

10:15	mdz_	mjg59: do you think there is any quantitative way we can
assess whether it works well for most of our current users?
10:15	mjg59	mdz_: Not really, no

10:15	mdz_	I feel a bit doomed either way, not having much in the way
of concrete data to work from
10:15	mvo	mjg59: I got positive feedback about basic video playback on
a i965 but I can not confirm that myself

10:16	mdz_	mvo: of the issues mjg59 has raised, can you tell us if
they seem to be encountered frequently by users?
10:16	mjg59	Some feedback on how many people are actually using it
would be helpful, but since we don't enable it by default on upgrades
it's quite possible that most of the people following gutsy aren't
running it

10:16	mdz_	mvo: do you get many bug reports about them?
10:18	mvo	we get a fair number of reports, but not that many about
video/glx apps it seems. but its difficult to tell if people just bear
with it because its still pre-beta or because they not encounter
issues

What I make from this is that there is a substantial need for user
feedback on new features that might be enabled by default on the next
Ubuntu release. Yet it seems that no real effort was made to get this
feedback aside from waiting for bugreports to flow in. Nevertheless a
major decision was made (to enable compiz by default) based mostly on
personal experience of the developers and a lack of bug reports which
might or might not be because few users are using compiz.

Now, there is a forum section devoted to developer <-> user
interaction.[1] This would be a perfect example of something that
could be posted there for feedback. I do realize this will never be a
representative sample of the ubuntu user base, but you will get
feedback from a sufficiently large group to allow you to make these
kind of decisions. I must say I was a bit disappointed that this
opportunity was not used.

Cheers,

Wouter

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=265