On Friday, September 30, 2011 16:33:36 Rui Maciel wrote: > On 09/30/2011 01:29 PM, todd rme wrote: > > I don't think any of those are good options, since all of them have > > the same result: spamming developers with huge amounts of useless > > information. This would only make it far more difficult to manage > > bug reports. Just being patient seems like the only solution that > > could work in practice on a large scale. > > Inquiring about the state of a piece of work which a person is > responsible for is not "huge amounts of useless information". If some > of these bugs are patiently left unaddressed then we end up where we > are right now: with bugs left open for years, with the whole bug > report process being left broken and with users wasting their time > filing bug reports which will never be addressed. How is this a > better way of handling things?
I agree. There is a common complaint by developers, that they waste their time on bug report reading/asnwering instead of coding. While this seems reasonable, you have to understand that developing a software product involves interaction with your users and dealing with bugs. True in companies and in open source as well. It is perfectly understandable that you decide what you want your valuable time to spend on, still think twice if it worths or not to ignore "bad" bug reports. Do this because: - the user is a not a developer, and while not at first, maybe after a few questions he can deliever the needed information to transform the report into a good one and you can fix a bug, that might be hidden in the app. - you might be a user of another software, and imagine how fustrating is to report bugs and get no answer (or after 6 months get it closed, because it had "no activity"). - if you constantly ignore the reports, the reputation of your application will be bad. People get fustrated and might not start to report bugs at all. - the number of bug reports will keep growing, becoming unmanagable - this is the process where you get in touch with your users. Making users happy should make you happy as well. In a perfect world we would answer all reports. In a not-so perfect word, even closing them as duplicate or invalid (old, known bugs, already fixed) without any comment is good. If you do it while they keep coming, then you will not end up with an unmanagable number of bugs. Of course, there are software with more users (and more reports) and only a few developers, and I can understand that this task can be hard, but still, try to allocate some of your time to user interaction. If your team is big enough to have people that could deal with bugs, the better. Over time, in a healthy (bigger) project, one could attract experienced users as well to deal with the bug report handling, especially finding duplicates or asking questions. Remember that you are the one that knows the best and fastest if a bug is valid/invalid/duplicate/fixed. For a generic bug triager who works on the whole KDE, this is hard. For a developer working on the project it is much easier, as you recognize the pattern e.g from a backtrace. Andras >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
