Lobbying for Votes for my Bugs!

[Igor Couto]

Dear Jeanne,

Thank you for your reply:

On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 02:39  PM, Jeanne A. E. DeVoto wrote:

> At 11:29 AM +1000 9/19/2003, Igor Couto wrote:
>> Very true. Nevertheless, if the majority of the bugs fall into the
>> same level of 'severity', and there are only a limited number of
>> developers available to handle them (just in theory), then the votes
>> will be, indeed, critical in determining which ones will be looked
>> at first - and how many resources are put into overcoming a specific
>> bug or problem area.
>
> This surely will not be the case if the votes turn into a popularity 
> contest, subject to lobbying, email campaigns for other people to vote 
> for "your" bugs, and so on.
>
> (I mean, come on.)

Running a VOTE, by its very definition, *IS* a kind of popularity 
contest - isn't it? - ie, if everyone 'votes' for a particular bug (the 
bug is 'popular'), will that bug not take priority? If that is not the 
case, then perhaps the Revolution folks should let us know more clearly 
how the voting is going to be used in their product development 
strategy.

As you well pointed out by using quotes, "my" bugs are not "mine" at 
all. They are Revolution bugs. I just happened to notice that there are 
newbies galore, who have very little knowledge of bugzilla, and of the 
bugs already reported. Even the 'seasoned' developers seem to keep on 
running over the same problems again, and again, and again. As you can 
see, many people in this list find bugzilla daunting, confusing, and 
time-consuming. Nevertheless, we all have 1 single objective: to 
improve Revolution.

Many of us hardly have any time to spend searching through the 650+ 
reported bugs in bugzilla, let alone leisurely browse through the list, 
looking for the most 'appropriate' ones to cast our votes, and try to 
give some direction to the development efforts of the RunRev team...

> I see votes on bug reports (as opposed to enhancement requests) as 
> being useful mostly in gauging how many people have run into a 
> particular bug (and found it hard or impossible to work around).

Well, that notion is just downright wrong. Your statistics will be on 
the people who use the bug-reporting system, and who CAST VOTES. This 
will NOT give you a true indication of the percentage of users who 
encounter bugs. How many people are Revolution users who would have run 
into a particular bug, and never even had a single look at bugzilla - 
let alone register, search, and cast a vote?...

This 'voting' system is going to be useful to a *very particular* kind 
of user - one who already has a serious investment into Revolution. If 
you want statistics about the larger population of ALL users who 'run 
into' bugs, this voting scheme is NOT the way to go...

> That usefulness, such as it is, will disappear pretty fast if the 
> votes are perceived to have been affected by other factors, and become 
> unreliable in gauging just how much of a problem each bug is for Rev 
> users.

Before you establish a strategy for solving a problem, you have to 
define *very clearly* what your problem is. In this case, the problem 
seems to be with the definition of what "gauging"  "how much of a 
problem each bug is", is. Is 'gauging' defining the 'severity' of the 
bugs? (this is a measure of 'how much of a problem' a bug is, after 
all.). Is 'gauging' counting how many people have come across a bug? Is 
'gauging' counting how many projects were abandoned because of a 
specific bug, or how many people have given up on Revolution altogether 
because of a particular bug? Or would defining 'how much of a problem' 
a bug is entail analysing how many different areas of the program it 
affects? Or how old the bug is? Or how much time people waste trying to 
circumvent it? Different strategies for different measurements - and if 
you are not clear about what is it that you want to measure, you WILL 
get incorrect measurements.

Because of all these factors, I saw nothing wrong in calling people's 
attention to the bugs I had reported - specially considering that some 
of them keep popping up again and again in this mailing list. Just like 
everybody else, I do not have the time to search exhaustively and 
frequently through the bug database, and often miss related bugs, which 
others have reported. My thinking was very similar to yours, in which 
that if anyone else had come across these bugs before, or had thought 
about these issues, I was providing an easy link for them to voice 
their opinion. These bugs ARE, indeed, important to me, and I want to 
have them solved quickly. If others disagree, they can just ignore my 
email. If others think alike, they can cast their vote. Isn't that the 
entire purpose of the voting in the first place?

As far as a 'lobbying' contests go - *please*, let's come down to 
reality here... I used the term 'lobbying' in my email header in jest, 
and thought that it would be understood as such. Obviously, people are 
taking this as meaning more than what was intended. There CANNOT be a 
bug that is 'yours' and one that is 'mine' - just how silly IS that 
concept!

  What people seem to be taking exception to is the fact that I 
'announced' my bugs OPENLY in the mailing list, and used the term 
-lobbying-. Well, sorry about that. Next time I'll just use the 
expression "seeking expressions of interest" instead, and sugar-coat my 
narrative in third-person impersonal tones (*never* will I refer to 
*my* bugs again!) - and then everything will be all right...

Cheers,

--
Igor de Oliveira Couto
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