bugzilla triage madness :-/

[Jon Stanley]

Might wanna point to the plagiarized source - that took me hours to
write :).  Seriously, that is a good point. I realize that there is
limited reporter time.  However, there are *many* more than 590
reporters to report bugs - it becomes an issue of supply and demand at
that point - the demand for developer time outstrips the supply of it.
  Sad but true...

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> Hi
>
>  Following from experience with the recent Fedora Bugzilla mass-triage,
>  I figured that I would write a few words about the state of bugs in
>  open source projects, and where people's perception can tend to fall
>  short of reality. [Some of you will recognize where it's largely
>  plagiarized from]
>
>  OSS developers assume that  because there is not a dedicated paid
>  testing team hidden within the walls of a particular contracting
>  company, that there are infinite testing resources. Instead, just as
>  with proprietary software, the resources are finite, the amount of
>  hours in a day are finite, and the fact is that most of bug reporters
>  are contributing to an OSS community in their spare time, not being
>  paid to do it full-time. In fact the overwhelming majority of users is
>  pretty happy to rant on discussion forums and mailing lists and let
>  software authors go fish for problems themselves, rather than expend
>  the time and energy to push report through "proper" channels. In fact,
>  it is debatable that the number of OSS bug reporters is growing faster
>  than the number of OSS code authors.
>
>  Given these resource limitations, bug reporters have to be selective
>  in their reporting. The volume of code and the number of problems to
>  report is literally more than they can handle. In order to handle the
>  workload, they filter ruthlessly. If a project takes months to answer
>  a bug report, or repeatedly asks to retest or confirm a problem no one
>  has looked at still exists, that's unlikely to get as much attention
>  as a project that is quick to process reports and does not make
>  reporters feel they're wasting their time. I'm not saying that this is
>  good, bad, or indifferent, but simply a fact of life in the open
>  source world.
>
>  In conclusion, the open source bug reporting community is very happy
>  to help projects better their software. However, the people that
>  produce problem reports are very much inundated with issues that
>  should be reported. What does this mean to you, the bug handlers? That
>  we'd like for you to understand that every problem is not going to be
>  reported in a perfect way, and simply asking reporters to work more on
>  reports is not a guarantee that they will do it. In fact most of them
>  will just report their activity to channels where the bar is set
>  lower, and the cost/benefits ratio is better for them. The only reward
>  for reporting issues is having them handled. When handling is poor
>  this ratio gets very bad quickly.
>
>  There are humans the other side of the channel too.
>
>  --
>  Nicolas Mailhot
>
>
>
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>



-- 
Jon Stanley
Fedora Bug Wrangler
jstanley at fedoraproject.org