Re: bug day! (topics needed)

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 7/11/05, John Williams <jwilliams business otago ac nz> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 15:52 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> > The big question: what task do we sic people on?
> 
> Are there any tasks that non-programmers (or at least those not familiar
> with GNOME libraries etc.) could do?  10,000 bugs is a lot!
> 
> I tried my hand at triaging bugs based on stack traces, but found it
> somewhat embarrassing.  What is the next (useful) level down, in terms
> of technical knowledge needed, that I and others could do?

Yeah, I forgot to mention it as a strike against crash triage that it
is hard for newbies. (And we should figure out how to prevent *anyone*
on bugsquad from dealing with library bugs. For various reasons I
don't generally do that myself, even.) Clearly we need better 'you can
start here' directions, that point at a group of bugs anyone can
handle and suggest how to work from there. I think over the years
we've written this kind of thing before, but it may not be easy to
find right now.

The 'unconfirmed' queries could be this kind of thing, particularly
with old versions. Instructions can be fairly simple:
* read old bug
* check to see if old bug is:
 * clear and comprehensible (if not, ask for more detail and/or rephrase)
 * still applies to newer version (if so, update version, note that it
is still relevant, otherwise close)
* if you're comfortable with the search interface, check to see if
there are duplicates

That's about 50% of bug triage right there, and that's certainly what
we've tried to get bugday newbies to focus on in the past. Other
old-timers, am I forgetting something?

Luis