unnecessary QA work (was Re: dapper-live test)

[Jason Stewart]

Hi Matt,

Sorry, just a thought I had - bit of a sidetrack perhaps.

On 5/4/06, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 07:44:25PM +0000, Chip Piller wrote:
> > I tested the dapper-live-i386.iso released May 2, 2006.
>
> Thanks very much for the test and detailed feedback.  However, several of
> your bugs had already been reported in Malone, and so the duplicates created
> unnecessary QA work.  In the future, when filing bugs, please first search
> to see whether your problem has already been reported.
>

Is this realistic to ask of people? I'm not so sure - so I'm curious
what your experience says. Speaking only from the experience of the
(small) projects I've been involved in - I've been grateful for anyone
willing to take the time to report a bug. Maybe 50% haven't been real
bugs, but I feel that's one price to pay, and that it really is QA's
job ultimately (my opinion).

It takes a lot of work to post a bug report. That discourages people
from posting.
Checking whether a bug exists already often takes quite a bit of
searching as well - especially if it's the first bug you've posted on
a project.

If you really discourate people by telling them not to post unless
they have first thoroughly checked whether it already exists - many
people will just not post. Is this what you want? Perhaps, but maybe
not - just an observation based on my admittedly limited experience -
wondering what you've encountered.

Cheers, jas.