On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, Ralph F De Witt wrote: > First of I would like to say that all at Mandarke and volunteers and > developers did very well with 9.0. It is going to be a great release. I am > pleased that the beta cycle was a little longer than 8.2. This has certainly > helped to eleminate most bugs. > I have no comments as to the building and testing phases. > But I have comments on the reporting phase. I liked that there were three ways > to report bugs, but I think that needs to be limited to one way. I really got > mad when reporting 3 or 4 bugs during the RC3 portion via MandrakeExpert when > I was told to get a Bugzilla account and report them myself, as the expert > told me he ws told not to do any more bug reports because they were all > usless. This really angered me. I agree that there are a lot of bad bug > reports with a open beta like we do. I have probbly done a few my self. But I > liked the MandrakeExpert way of doing it because I had someone more > knowledgeable than me to look at it and say, hey how about doing this and > this and sending the info. Or send the contains of such and such file. This > allowed me to turn a bad bug report into a useful one, and one that was taken > away from me I got very angry. > I think bug reporting should have only one way to report, and that it should > be a two step process. One submitte a report, get feed back as to other > things that are need, when useful, it is submitted. I think that some sort of > feed back needs to be given to the person reporting the bug when it is > actioned and completed. > Any way just my $.02, I hope it helps make the next beta testing go round > smoother.
I would agree with this sentiment. In the end, what needs to be accomplished for the next beta cycle is to increase the number of bug reports dealt with successfully, while reducing the time developers/packages spend doing so. One aspect is ensuring that all bugs are reported in some way. I have done a bit of mining other sites (MandrakeForum and PCLinuxonline) to try and get bugs that were compained about there reported (and I think I got at least one bug report to cooker). Also, accurate summaries of the number of unresolved bugs etc need to be available (watch the errata for some bugs that were known but not resolved that could have been ...). Other projects (OO.o, Mozilla, RH) seem to be able to use Bugzilla effectively, so I don't think Bugzilla is the problem. The other issues is that there is a substantial amount of free labour available, and this should be taken advantage of. And, there also need to be people who use the software in question daily. As an example (not to dis Fred), I don't think Fred Crozat uses Mozilla mail, but he is the packager. I do use mozilla-mail daily (and have about 30 people, increasing daily, using it on windows atm). I am quite sure that between the non-Mandrakesoft employees on this list, and the MandrakeExperts, that there could be approx 1 volunteer per major package. So, I think it would be feasible (depeding on how easily Bugzilla can be hacked to do this) to have at least one non-mandrakesoft bug-triager per package, who would be able to answer the easy questions (fixed in -Xmdk, known bug in original package, fix in progress etc), thus removing a lot of the noise from the list. Since some of these volunteers may be "experts" at Mandrakeexpert, it may be convenient to be able to turn a bugzilla bug report into a support question. Similarly, a support question may need to be turned into a bug report. Then, all confirmed bug reports would go to the cooker list (since this is probably one of the quickest ways of dealing with real bugs). Unfortunately, that means people will have to make 'value judgements'. Now, we have a problem of who may thus write to Bugzilla, since we don't want to overrun the volunteers either. I would propose that users be given a rating, based on the quality of their bug reports, and the number of bug reports they could post would be dependant on that rating. Thus, if they have a number of bugs they want to report, they would have to ensure that the first bug reports are of high enough quality to warrant them posting more bugs. Customers (boxed set buyers or MandrakeClub members) may be given more bug reports for the same rating (50% more?), since this would give (for example) a corporate Club member significant influence on bugfixing to make membership more worthwhile. Then, we need to make sure that we have sufficiently motivated volunteers. Mandrakeexpert seems(ed?) to work well (although I haven't really 'experted' there for 6 months or more), but maybe volunteers would get twice the score for a resolved bug (based on the reporters rating and the developers rating maybe) at Mandrakeexpert (since resolved bugs in a beta/RC cycle must be worth more than explaining how to fix that same bug later). Since by now we have almost integrated Mandrakeexpert and bugzilla and MandrakeClub, I also see no reason why all the Mandrake sites should not be included in this setup, thereby merging all the Mandrake sites into one consistent interface. When reviewing a bug report in Bugzilla, the hardware could possilby be considered if the user had entered it before (or subscribed to MandrakeOnline) so known hardware issues could be quickly dealt with, posts by the reporter on other sites (Mandrakeforum) could be linked to (to get a rough indication of user experience etc). If all bugs were handled in Bugzilla, support questions which involve the bug can link to the Bugzilla report. IMHO, using Bugzilla more would make the development process seem more open (when in fact at the moment it is more open than it seems), and should be more productive. Apologies to those on both cooker and culb-volunteers (Danny, Austin, Vince, Ben etc) but I have mentioned some of these ideas before on club-volunteers, and Deno asked me to repeat them when things calmed down ... that might, or might not, be now. Regards, Buchan -- |----------------Registered Linux User #182071-----------------| Buchan Milne Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager Cellphone * Work +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x121 Stellenbosch Automotive Engineering http://www.cae.co.za GPG Key http://ranger.dnsalias.com/bgmilne.asc 1024D/60D204A7 2919 E232 5610 A038 87B1 72D6 AC92 BA50 60D2 04A7
