The changing nature of bug reports

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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On Dec 14, 2006, at 4:10 AM, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> ...
> When you experience a crash in Windows, which is what most new users
> will be used to, a dialog also pops up and you are given the choice of
> reporting the crash or not. If you accept  some logs are uploaded and
> you're done. In our case you are taken to a page on launchpad where you
> first have to register by giving your email address and then write a
> description of what happened. Some users may give up at that point,
> which means we are loosing reports. Others will continue without quite
> knowing how it works. We've seen "I'm here because the crash dialog 
> told me to go here, but I don't know what I'm supposed to do." Such 
> users may also not be prepared for the bugmail they have just signed 
> up for (esp. if the bug gets duped) and may form a bad impression of 
> Ubuntu based on that.
> ...

That's one of the reasons I registered the CrashReporting 
specification, to file crash reports separately from bug reports: 
sending non-technical crash victims into a bug tracker won't scale, 
either technically or socially. (The other reason is that crash reports 
are very duplicate-heavy, and a dedicated system can prioritize crashes 
by frequency more efficiently, like Mozilla Talkback does.)
<https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/crash-reporting>

> ...
> I think we should go further than that too though. If the user 
> reporting the bug has no Launchpad account arrives at a new bug page 
> for a product, she should be presented with two choices: "Take my 
> automated report and leave me alone." or "Yes, I want to be involved 
> in following this up further."
> ...

Interesting idea, though once we get to 30 or 40 million users we might 
need to make further involvement harder to find, to increase the 
signal-to-noise ratio.

Cheers
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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