I spent 20-some years as a software development manager - a significant
(arguably *the* significant) part of that job is figuring out the
balance between new feature development and bug fixing, and then setting
priorities between various bugs. Some are very serious and very hard and
will take a lot of time to investigate (and more to fix), others are
straightforward, and give you quick boost for little effort, etc.
The existence of the voting system is (I hope) only one more helpful
input to the prioritization task of the development managers (and the
individual developers) at Runrev. The developer and/or manager
responsible for this area must be able to look at the bug, evaluate its
impact (on users and potential users), estimate the effort involved in
investigating, developing and subsequently testing a fix to this bug; if
they've not yet picked it to work on, it's got to be because there are
other more important issues (or better ROI efforts) underway. Those
decisions involve a lot more than vote-counting.
I just don't accept the blame (or guilt) implied by saying its *our* (the users) collective fault it hasn't been voted for, and therefore hasn't been fixed yet :-)
I have to admit that at the moment, I haven't cast any votes for any bugs. To do so would imply that I have *chosen* the ones to vote for - and (with my sw dev manager background) I just can't do that without at least a brief review all the outstanding bugs.
Well, said Alex - I agree with you for the same reasons (including having been a software development manager. I would be shocked if the RunRev team felt itself bound by the pseudo-democracy of the Bugzilla voting system (having said that, I have indeed voted as an expression of interest in issues that affect me personally, but I don't have high expectations for particular bugs to be fixed just because I voted for them). There are several dimensions to assessing the seriousness of bugs and the realistic chance of fixing them by the next release or whatever. Clearly RR should keep its collective ear to the ground to see what is worrying users and where the show-stoppers are; but given the inevitable imbalance between the bugs and deficiencies that will exist in any complex software product and the amount of resources available to deal with them, I think we have no choice but to trust the team.
If I do have a criticism of the bug database, it is the number of 'unconfirmed' bugs that are really pretty much known by the user community to be real. IMHO it would be worth updating BZ (again) in this respect.
Graham ---------------------------------------- Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK and France
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