Bug Triage Project - WAS: Re: Dapper Flight 5 Installation Report

[Daniel Robitaille]

On 3/15/06, Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 14:32 -0500, Francois-Denis Gonthier wrote:
> >
> >
> > I'm scared of subscribing to Ubuntu-bugs.  I fear my mailbox will
> > overflow :(
> >
> > But I'm very interested by the 'triage team' idea.  I can even provide
> > patches
> > myself sometimes.
>
> IMHO no sane developer would contribute their time to this until some
> decent bug reporting guidelines are in place - who wants to wade through
> a ton of impossibly vague bug reports asking users for more information
> over and over and over?

In a perfect world, I don't want developers to look at these bug
reports, at least not initially (I really like that "drinking out of
the fire hose" analogy). That's a not efficient usage of their limited
time and of their skills.   That's why paid QA staff(s), and community
based people need to be the first line; weed out the duplicates and
obvious to-be-rejected reports;  get in the report all the important
information needed from the reporter.  Then the developers can look at
the leftovers reports, and hopefully they will be in a good enough
shape so that they can identify the problem more easily.

> The ALSA team has good instructions in place for bug reporting including
> a script to gather required information and as a result I would estimate
> 90% of bug reports we see are good enough to be immediately actionable.

*) users don't read guidelines. They just want their bug/problem to go away.

*) Malone can receive reports that are related to any of  15,000+
packages.  I'm skeptical that a script could deal for that wide range
of possibility of what went wrong, and what pieces of info are needed
for the developers.

One thing that could really help would be if one of the question when
submitting a bug report was the version Ubuntu/applications the user
is reporting a problem against.   A large majority  of the bug reports
initially don't have that information, and you often have to sort the
reporter if this is a Breezy or Dapper problem, and exactly which
version he/she was using.  That type of info could be done at the
initial bug submission level.

--
Daniel Robitaille