Thank you for your reply:
On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 02:39 PM, Jeanne A. E. DeVoto wrote:
At 11:29 AM +1000 9/19/2003, Igor Couto wrote:Very true. Nevertheless, if the majority of the bugs fall into the same level of 'severity', and there are only a limited number of developers available to handle them (just in theory), then the votes will be, indeed, critical in determining which ones will be looked at first - and how many resources are put into overcoming a specific bug or problem area.
This surely will not be the case if the votes turn into a popularity contest, subject to lobbying, email campaigns for other people to vote for "your" bugs, and so on.
(I mean, come on.)
Running a VOTE, by its very definition, *IS* a kind of popularity contest - isn't it? - ie, if everyone 'votes' for a particular bug (the bug is 'popular'), will that bug not take priority? If that is not the case, then perhaps the Revolution folks should let us know more clearly how the voting is going to be used in their product development strategy.
As you well pointed out by using quotes, "my" bugs are not "mine" at all. They are Revolution bugs. I just happened to notice that there are newbies galore, who have very little knowledge of bugzilla, and of the bugs already reported. Even the 'seasoned' developers seem to keep on running over the same problems again, and again, and again. As you can see, many people in this list find bugzilla daunting, confusing, and time-consuming. Nevertheless, we all have 1 single objective: to improve Revolution.
Many of us hardly have any time to spend searching through the 650+ reported bugs in bugzilla, let alone leisurely browse through the list, looking for the most 'appropriate' ones to cast our votes, and try to give some direction to the development efforts of the RunRev team...
I see votes on bug reports (as opposed to enhancement requests) as being useful mostly in gauging how many people have run into a particular bug (and found it hard or impossible to work around).
Well, that notion is just downright wrong. Your statistics will be on the people who use the bug-reporting system, and who CAST VOTES. This will NOT give you a true indication of the percentage of users who encounter bugs. How many people are Revolution users who would have run into a particular bug, and never even had a single look at bugzilla - let alone register, search, and cast a vote?...
This 'voting' system is going to be useful to a *very particular* kind of user - one who already has a serious investment into Revolution. If you want statistics about the larger population of ALL users who 'run into' bugs, this voting scheme is NOT the way to go...
That usefulness, such as it is, will disappear pretty fast if the votes are perceived to have been affected by other factors, and become unreliable in gauging just how much of a problem each bug is for Rev users.
Before you establish a strategy for solving a problem, you have to define *very clearly* what your problem is. In this case, the problem seems to be with the definition of what "gauging" "how much of a problem each bug is", is. Is 'gauging' defining the 'severity' of the bugs? (this is a measure of 'how much of a problem' a bug is, after all.). Is 'gauging' counting how many people have come across a bug? Is 'gauging' counting how many projects were abandoned because of a specific bug, or how many people have given up on Revolution altogether because of a particular bug? Or would defining 'how much of a problem' a bug is entail analysing how many different areas of the program it affects? Or how old the bug is? Or how much time people waste trying to circumvent it? Different strategies for different measurements - and if you are not clear about what is it that you want to measure, you WILL get incorrect measurements.
Because of all these factors, I saw nothing wrong in calling people's attention to the bugs I had reported - specially considering that some of them keep popping up again and again in this mailing list. Just like everybody else, I do not have the time to search exhaustively and frequently through the bug database, and often miss related bugs, which others have reported. My thinking was very similar to yours, in which that if anyone else had come across these bugs before, or had thought about these issues, I was providing an easy link for them to voice their opinion. These bugs ARE, indeed, important to me, and I want to have them solved quickly. If others disagree, they can just ignore my email. If others think alike, they can cast their vote. Isn't that the entire purpose of the voting in the first place?
As far as a 'lobbying' contests go - *please*, let's come down to reality here... I used the term 'lobbying' in my email header in jest, and thought that it would be understood as such. Obviously, people are taking this as meaning more than what was intended. There CANNOT be a bug that is 'yours' and one that is 'mine' - just how silly IS that concept!
What people seem to be taking exception to is the fact that I 'announced' my bugs OPENLY in the mailing list, and used the term -lobbying-. Well, sorry about that. Next time I'll just use the expression "seeking expressions of interest" instead, and sugar-coat my narrative in third-person impersonal tones (*never* will I refer to *my* bugs again!) - and then everything will be all right...
Cheers,
-- Igor de Oliveira Couto ---------------------------------- ----------------------------------
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