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

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 11:47:02AM +0200, Eric Feliksik wrote:
> Although overall it might cost some extra time for the users filing 
> bugs, it *really* helps the developers fixing them. Duplicate bugreports 
> are in the way and the devs are losing the overview in the massive 
> amount of bugs. There are a lot more users than developers. If they all 
> report the same bugs, the developer will be busy managing malone 
> full-time. Pure overhead.

It's worth pointing out that not everyone can actually tell reliably
when two bugs are duplicates; and this is not intended to suggest that
they're stupid, since it can be a difficult task! I haven't really kept
detailed track, but as a developer I estimate that I spend roughly the
same amount of time sorting out duplicates as I do untangling people who
*thought* their bug was a duplicate and appended a comment to some
similar-looking existing bug (most frequently, apparently thinking that
all crashes are the same bug). Furthermore, the latter means that the
history of the bug remains confusing until I fix the bug, so it can
often end up wasting my time months later as well.

Where my packages are concerned, all other things being equal, if you
aren't *sure* that your bug is a duplicate, I'd rather you filed it
separately. It's not that hard to mark duplicates as they come in if
you're keeping on top of things, and a duplicate is better than the risk
of releasing with a bug that nobody thought it was necessary to report.
If I get lots of duplicates of a bug (as has been happening a lot
recently thanks to the addition of a crash handler dialog to Ubiquity),
well, if nothing else that points me in the direction of which bugs need
to be fixed most urgently and gives me an incentive to fix them urgently
to stop the bugs flooding in.

I'm not encouraging people to deliberately file duplicates or anything,
but I don't believe duplicates are quite as much in the way as you say.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]