The changing nature of bug reports

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 03:31:04PM -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 04:10:50PM +0100, 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 the long term, we will want for crash reports to be treated differently
> than normal bug reports.  Specifically, there should be an option to submit
> the crash report without context and without cluttering the bug tracking
> system with irrelevant reports in the process.
> 
> - A facility should be provided for reporting problems which does not imply
>   this contract (e.g., support rather than bugs)

This actually might fit into a third category separate from bugs and
support requests, where like Henrik says no further action is required.
This is similar to how Firefox's Talkback system (aka Quality Feedback
Agent) works.

  http://www.mozilla.org/quality/qfa.html
  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Quality_Feedback_Agent

They also have some tools for doing analysis against the crash data.  I
haven't played with it myself but I saw a presentation on it at OSCON by
the Mozilla QA folks and it looked very slick.  It enables spotting
trends in crashes, which could be useful for identifying regressions or
side effects to recently deployed changes.
 
Unfortunately, this QFA/Talkback tool is not open source (according to
the above link).  However it might serve as an example for what could be
done.

Bryce