Re: [Usability] Overthinking things.

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

Am Mittwoch, den 09.12.2009, 22:50 +0800 schrieb Lincoln Yeoh:
> I think in many cases having/requiring the user/"bug" submitter 
> "talk" directly to the developer may not be the best way of doing 
> things. And instead someone else should be between the two.

That's what a Bugsquad is for, as developers should have time to code
instead of having to discuss too much with users. To avoid
misunderstandings, please note the "too much" in this sentence.
For GNOME, see http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/ .

> For example, I've seen users being asked to split their bug reports 
> into multiple bugs.
> 
> If the system requires users to convert a _valid_ "stuff is broken" 
> report into multiple bug reports, before broken stuff gets fixed, 
> then it just makes things less likely to be fixed. The users might 
> actually have alternatives they can use, so they go away and stuff 
> stays broken. The developer may feel that's fine with him/her, but it 
> does not help the project.

This might get a bit off-topic, anyway, for a better understanding:

I'm one of these people asking users to please file only one issue per
report in GNOME Bugzilla. That's also described in
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=bug-writing.html .
If users spend a minute before dropping all their issues into one bug
report, maybe even without providing steps to reproduce, it would make
changes to get stuff fixed way more likely. :-)

The problem behind it all is that all manpower is limited (hence I don't
split reports myself) and that too much noise in a report kills
motivation of developers to fix it by crawling through a long,
complicated, unclear and unstructured text.

Please note that I'm polarizing here. Of course there's also lots of
good reports (I'd say the huge majority is very helpful).

andre

-- 
 mailto:ak-47 gmx net | failed
 http://www.iomc.de/  | http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper