Dear James, Amir and fellow wikimedia devs, I understand your concern and I am not suggesting that we should force a user to enter all Bugzilla fields but add those 5 questions as a guideline in the free-text form. Reporters can use it when they feel uncertain what information we are looking for but they are not forced to stick to any format in particular.
Additionally, I think that Mediawiki users are as technological advanced as Firefox users so I don't think this will scare somebody away. If we really want to make it easier for people to file a bug then we should add a simple wizard to guide them through the process. In particular choosing the right product and component can be quite confusing / intimidating for somebody new to Medawiki. On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:43 PM, James Alexander <[email protected]>wrote: > On 2/13/2011 8:46 PM, Diederik van Liere wrote: > > I think we can draw some inspiration from Mozilla's use of Bugzilla and > > particular the format they are encourage users when submitting a > bugreport: > > > > 1) Steps to reproduce > > 2) Expected result > > 3) Actual result > > 4) Reproducible (by bugreporter): always / sometimes > > 5) Version information, extensions installed, database used (this > > information is dependent on the skill level of the bugreporter and maybe > we > > can add make this information easily retrievable if it's current not easy > to > > determine. > > > > So maybe we can paste these 5 steps (or something similar) in the initial > > form used to file a bugreport. > > > > This would increase the quality of bugreports and make it easier for bug > > triaging. > > I can totally understand the idea behind this but I think Amir brings up > the concern about this best: > > On 2/13/2011 5:56 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: > > bugzilla.wikimedia.org is the tracker where i report more bugs than > > elsewhere. The second is bugzilla.mozilla.org . It's not because > > Firefox has less bugs (quite the contrary!) but because Mozilla's > > tracker requires me to fill more fields, such as steps for > > reproduction. This may encourage detailed reporting that helps > > developers solve the bugs, but it may also discourage people from > > reporting them in the first place. > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > [email protected] > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > Gathering all that information on a bug report form could quite clearly > make it easier to reproduce bugs and may make resolving them easier but > I worry that the harder and/or more complicated we make the reporting > the more likely we are to scare someone away from taking the time to > file the bug (which we want). I'm not totally sure where the best > balance there is. > > -- > James Alexander > Associate Community Officer > Wikimedia Foundation > [email protected] > +1-415-839-6885 x6716 > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- <a href="http://about.me/diederik";>Check out my about.me profile!</a> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
