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

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 02:36:58PM +0530, Jason Stewart wrote:
> 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).

Duplicates are a fact of life, but it is not too much to ask, no.  Consider
that it takes the bug reporter perhaps a minute to look for their bug, and
then a few minutes more to write it up if they don't find it.  Then consider
that all of these reports, from thousands of people, are funneled to a tiny
development team, who must deal with all of the duplicates.  This means they
spend less time on real bugs, which means less value for the users reporting
them.

> It takes a lot of work to post a bug report. That discourages people
> from posting.

If that bug report is a duplicate, that effort is usually wasted.

> 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.

If someone is not willing to spend a minute searching for a bug, will they
be willing to answer questions about their problem to help get it fixed?
Will they be willing to gather and send stack traces, debug logs, etc.?  If
not, then I would rather receive the same report from someone willing to do
so.

-- 
 - mdz