package shepherding

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 16:28, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:

> > I don't remember the last time I
> > actually had time to do a bugzilla query.
> 
> Here. That's what I mean. Shouldn't developers at least have some time
> to spend on hunting bugs? A few hours a week? There have been occasions
> where I reported serious issues (being crashes in important parts of
> prominent software), and still the developer did not approach me for
> more details but after some serious nagging on my part. Do I really have
> to chase after developers on the mailing lists or in IRC if I already
> filed in bugzilla? Hey I don't mind, but you should know that this is a
> two way street.

If I spend a few hours more on quering bugzilla bugs, that just means I
won't be reading incomming bugzilla emails for those few hours, and
incoming bugs will be ignored. If someone bugs me on irc about their
favourite bug then someone elses favourite bug gets ignored. 

Of course we have to make sure we spend our time wisely on bugfixes,
feature work, communications and everything, but at the end of the day,
if there isn't enough hours to get things done, they won't get done.
Good scheduling only gets you so far.

> > One could say its the fault of management that there aren't 10x as many
> > engineers as we have now so we'd have time to fix more things.
> 
> Twice as many would be enough. But seriously, if you have just a few
> people who can spend their time on hunting bugs that would already make
> a *big* difference.

Yes. So, please, people on this list, fix a bug today!

> > However, I very rarely see anyone fixing any of the non-trivial bugs I
> > own (and I own thousands of them, so I wouldn't mind some help).
> 
> Part of this problem is communication. You can't expect (most) outsiders
> to fix difficult bugs in software that you are supposed to be the
> authority on. This means that if you want others to make non trivial
> fixes you will have to communicate some of your knowledge of the
> internals of "your" software, or wait for someone to come around that
> already has that knowledge.
> 
> Another approach would be to set up work groups of a few people
> attending to a certain package. But that again is a management issue.
> And it would still require the developer to have/take time to
> communicate with these people.

I agree with what you say, and communication is important. But you make
this sound so easy, we (i.e. the developers) just have to communicate
more.

It seems its always the fault of the developer when something isn't
ideal. The developer should just write more devel docs, should just
write more docs, should just fix more bugs, should just communicate with
the community more, should just add that new important feature. 

Why isn't it never the fault of the person who wants to fix a difficult
bug that he didn't spend enough time trying to understand the code,
instead of the developer not spending enough time writing docs for
something that probably only that person needs.

I'm not saying developers should never write docs, never fix bugs, never
communicate or whatever. What i'm saying is that writing good software
needs a lot of work, in many areas, and developers do all sorts of
things. Hopefully developers have a good view of the "global" state of
their project and can spend their time where it gives best results.
Whenever you're on the side that "complains" about the developer not
having done something you only focus on that specific thing, and it
seems ridiculous that the developer hasn't done this simple small thing.
However, you need to step back and think about all the enourmous amount
of things the developer has done instead, and that perhaps he even made
the right prioritization when he chose to not spend his time on your
issue.

> > I may be a pessimist, but I doubt anyone would read any such docs.
> 
> Some people read docs. Then a lot don't. But you can't expect people to
> read information that has not been written down...
> 
> All in all I am not arguing that all progress on developing new software
> features should be stopped. But I do think bug hunting and squashing is
> an essential part of QA. Developers should have/take (more) time to
> either do it themselves or help out others who are willing.

We do already spend time fixing bugs, and it is an essential part of QA.
However you seem to want us to spend more time on that than we currently
do. The hard question is then: What would you want us then to not do
instead?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a suicidal voodoo matador who hangs with the wrong crowd. She's a 
transdimensional gypsy lawyer with someone else's memories. They fight crime!