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I Will File Bugs for You (2014)

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Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)

#41

Post by sukilot »

travisb wrote: post #40
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works for small projects, but doesn't scale brilliantly. At some point, many projects need to handle more bug reports than one person can realistically handle in their spare time, and totally unstructured freeform text slows things down on top of that.

If it becomes too much work for a single person then you just find a second person. When that becomes too much you can find an entire team of people, all contacted by a single email address. This is how customer support is done. Everybody is more satisfied this way, users get quick feedback that their problem is being looked at, developers get enough information put into the bug tracker to be useful in fixing the iss…

Most projects and companies don't have the funds to sponsor that level customer support. The modern Internet economy works so well because marginal cost (and price) is tiny. Customer support takes that a way.

Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)

#43

Post by mrec »

jlebar wrote: post #25
robbrown451 wrote: post #20

I like this. Less so for his actual offer, but more because he is calling attention to how hard it is to do this for people who don't want to deal with a "bug tracking system... optimized for people who spend all day every day working with it". It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc).....one sort o…

> It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc) Having worked for Mozilla for 5 years (Zack also is a former Mozillian), I actually don't think that the root problem is the ease of use of the bug tracker. Although bugzilla sucks, we still managed to get a ton of bug reports from external folks. But getti…

> I'd say that 80% of bugs I fixed while I worked on Firefox were identified by Mozillians

How much (if any) of that is due to bugs being somewhat more likely in prerelease builds, and Mozillians being much more likely to be dogfooding those?

Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)

#44

Post by dblohm7 »

mrec wrote: post #43
jlebar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be nice if there was a single, easy to use site for mere mortals to enter bug reports (and others can comment on them, vote on them, process them, etc) Having worked for Mozilla for 5 years (Zack also is a former Mozillian), I actually don't think that the root problem is the ease of use of the bug tracker. Although bugzilla sucks, we still managed to get a ton of bug reports from external folks. But getti…

> I'd say that 80% of bugs I fixed while I worked on Firefox were identified by Mozillians How much (if any) of that is due to bugs being somewhat more likely in prerelease builds, and Mozillians being much more likely to be dogfooding those?

Our Aurora and Beta populations are much larger than the Mozilla community. I think it's more an issue of who is reporting than who is dogfooding.

Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)

#45

Post by jakobegger »

Hello71 wrote: post #36
jakobegger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the "stupid shit" and "crap you don't want" is often useful feedback. At the very least, it tells you which parts of your app are most confusing. For example, if you get lots of complaints about something you consider obvious, maybe you should reconsider what's obvious. Often minor changes like improved docs or more googleable error messages can improve the experience for many users. And you'll see i…

Except when tons of emails come in that can't even coherently describe the part of the program that doesn't work or the approximate process they are attempting.

You can always ignore these incoherent emails. But if you put up some kind of filter before people can contact you, it won't be your decision which feedback you ignore.

And, if you really try, you can often extract valuable feedback even from what seems to be incoherent babble at first.

Re: I Will File Bugs for You (2014)

#46

Post by Kalium »

jakobegger wrote: post #45
Hello71 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when tons of emails come in that can't even coherently describe the part of the program that doesn't work or the approximate process they are attempting.

You can always ignore these incoherent emails. But if you put up some kind of filter before people can contact you, it won't be your decision which feedback you ignore. And, if you really try, you can often extract valuable feedback even from what seems to be incoherent babble at first.

You can, but sorting through them has costs measured in time. Filtering through dozens of drug report and smug reports for a useful bug report is not instantaneous.

When your entire project is just you in your spare time or maybe a handful of volunteers, that filter is the difference between support being helpful and support being a useless hellhole. And believe me, when the vast majority of support requests are useless crap, you lose motivation to care about those people with truly impressive speed.

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