"Report a Bug" menu item and its potential effects

[Matt Zimmerman]

The reason we have been increasingly integrating bug reporting into the
desktop is to increase the quality of bug reports.  By enabling the
collection of pertinent information from the user's system, we reduce the
amount of time spent by developers and QA dealing with incomplete bug
reports.

Simple information like the version of Ubuntu the user is running can make
the difference between a report which can be dealt with in a few seconds,
and one which stays around for days waiting for responses from the reporter.

This is especially true for crash reports, where we can do a preliminary
analysis of the problem, suggest a descriptive bug summary, and thereby help
the user (and the QA team) to identify duplicates.

My hope is that in the balance, the increased quality of bug reports will
more than offset the increase in volume.  

If your concern is in regard to the final release, I think it's probably
reasonable to change things for the final release, as it is primarily
intended for users who track the development release.  It is important that
there be a way for all users to submit these improved bug reports, though I
am open to suggestions about changing the UI.

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 03:44:50PM +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> (Martin Pitt suggested I raise this issue on ubuntu-devel at .)
> 
> Having recently started using Feisty, I noticed the "Report a Bug" item 
> in the Help menu for most applications. In bug 93350, Martin Pitt said 
> that this menu item will be present not only during Feisty development, 
> but also in the final 7.04 release. <https://launchpad.net/bugs/93350>
> 
> I think this plan should be revisited before the release. Launchpad 
> doesn't yet show bug statistics over time, but Carthik Sharma has 
> collected statistics showing that Ubuntu's numbers of Unconfirmed and 
> unassigned bug reports are both steadily increasing.
> <http://people.ubuntu-in.org/~carthik/bugstats/> In other words, as 
> Ubuntu's user base increases and becomes less geeky on average, the 
> number of people reporting bugs is (quite understandably) increasing 
> faster than the number of people fixing bugs and gardening bug reports.
> 
> Bug reports are like fertilizer: more is not always better. Sometimes 
> less technical users experience and report bugs that more technical 
> users have not experienced. And sometimes fixing these bugs may be more 
> important than what the developers would have worked on otherwise. But 
> that is unlikely to happen if the bug reports remain Unconfirmed in the 
> first place! And it will not be good to have thousands, or tens of 
> thousands, of users with stories of the form "I had problem X and 
> reported it to the Ubuntu developers, but I didn't even get a reply for 
> Y months".
> 
> There are certainly many things we can do on the Launchpad side to make 
> bug management more learnable and more efficient, and there are things 
> the Ubuntu community can do to encourage recruitment to the Bug Squad. 
> But I predict these measures will pale into insignificance next to the 
> extra bug reports invited by the "Report a Bug" menu item.
> 
> Is it too late to reconsider the inclusion of the menu item in Ubuntu 
> 7.04?
> 
> Cheers
> --
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/
> 
> 
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-- 
 - mdz