On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 14:36 +0000, Andy Pepperdine wrote: > On Tuesday 21 March 2006 13:58, Ross Johnson wrote: > > One thing is for sure though - providing a good problem description, > > clear reproducible steps and a sample test case will usually get your > > report confirmed by the QA people more quickly, and that means a > > developer will see it sooner. Beyond that I can't say. > > The difficulty is getting a good problem description. In my experience, most > users of any product need a special mindset to give such a description, and > if you ask two users to describe the same bug, you'll get two very different > answers. In our case, we are expecting them to know how to describe something > remotely.
Nevertheless, it is essential to have these. For anything but the most simple issues someone has to provide them. So the problem is to set up a system that achieves that. > If I was talking to someone about an issue, I would try to establish: > 1. What did you do to create the error? > 2. What happened when you did that? > 3. What did you expect to happen? > This last one is important because it can often cause the user to question > their own assumptions and realise the problem for themselves. Not always, > certainly, but it may reduce the noise. Yes, nothing works better than a dialog between real people. The next best level is perhaps the "expert system", and the idea has even been included to some [small] extent in MS products have they not? The MS paper clip thingy has a question-answer mode (which I've never found helpful in solving real problems by the way). > So I wonder whether instead of a single box for a description, we should > divide it into three questions as above. Or perhaps just prime the box with > three questions in it already. I've never seen this tried, so I have no idea > how it would be received. See https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/ That would be a good start. I had a quick look around at other groups that use reporting systems based on Bugzilla, and they are all more or less the same as OpenOffice.org. Unless OOo changes to a different system altogether I don't think fundamental changes like this will find much favour. Generally, I like the way the Opera.com support pages are organised. I'd like to see OOo do something similar to this. Go to the main page at https://bugs.opera.com and click on the "Support" button in the menu bar at the top. > One trivial thing though would be to reverse the version list so the most > recent are at the top (at least for Writer you've got to scroll down to the > bottom to find the most recent version). Yes, on the query page I don't see why I should have to scroll down to select the current version number. From the user perspective, the meaningless subcomponent names only confuse or intimidate. Cleaning this up, and even splitting the developer and user views of IZ would be a good first step. As a user, I don't need to see the cryptic subcomponent names used by developers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
