"Report a Bug" menu item and its potential effects

[Bryan Haskins]

I think it would make sense to remove the manual "Submit a Bug" item on the
menu for final, but obviously keep apport around in it's current incarnation
for crash handling and bug submission. While it needs to be easy for a user,
you can't do it to a degree where they may not know what specifically makes
a bug, and posting it manually will result in, like you said incomplete
reports, where as a apport does a good job.

On 3/27/07, Matt Zimmerman <mdz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> 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/
> >
> >
> > --
> > ubuntu-devel mailing list
> > ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
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>
> --
> - mdz
>
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>



-- 
Cheers,
Bryan
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