Bug Voting

[Scott James Remnant]

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 08:52 -0400, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> On 25/04/06, Sitsofe Wheeler <sitsofe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 00:25 -0500, Jonathon Anderson wrote:
> > > Would it be possible to implement a system of mod points where launchpad
> > > users can "bump" bugs to higher priority with votes? I know this already
> > > happens to some degree with dupes and comments, but if there was some
> > > way to track how many users complained about a certain bug, it would be
> > > easier to figure out which bugs affect the most people and thus which
> > > should be fixed first (all else being equal).
> >
> > Bug voting sounds nice and fair but I simply don't believe it works
> > unless it's intent is as a placebo to placate users (which is a fairly
> > good point for implementing it in the first place I suppose...).
> 
> This sounds like a problem which includes the "elitist attitude" card
> -- "the developer knows best" (and, no, I'm not accusing you of
> holding it).
> 
> There is a pretty important piece of information to be had from a bug
> frequency tracking mechanism (whether it is through voting or
> otherwise) and that is how many people are affected by it.
> 
The problem with voting, at least in my oh-so-humble opinion, is that
it's a form of drive-by gratification for the user and wherever it's
used it actually seems to reduce the number of people who are willing to
help solve the bug.

The chances are that if a bug is left open, especially one that a lot of
users seem to care about, it's because there isn't actually enough
information in the bug report to fix it.

Voting on these is utterly ineffectual, what we need is more people to
Subscribe to the bug and offer to help triage and fix it.

Likewise, for those bugs that appear to have obvious fixes, voting is
nowhere near as useful as preparing a patch and testing it in a variety
of different circumstances.  Open bugs with prepared and tested patches
can be closed before an uploaders eyes are open in the morning.

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20060425/8afe07a8/attachment.pgp