On the Democratic Operation of Bugzilla

[Gregory Lypny]

Hello Tom,

Actually, I couldn't make a balance sheet balance for the life of me  
(no offence to any accountants on this list), but I do appreciate  
your thoughtful analogy.  It falls short of our Bugzilla deal,  
though.  Accountants receive disparate (not desperate; that would be  
Nortel and Enrol) audit and tax preparation jobs from clients whose  
businesses and accounting practices the accounting firm often knows  
little about (and sometimes the clients know little about as well).   
Not so with Runtime Revolution.  The Revolution team built it,  
maintains it, and we use it; and my understanding is that the program  
itself is a series of stacks and is based on HyperTalk (or whatever  
the language is called).   So, receiving a stream of e-mails with bug  
reports should be quite informative for the Revolution team.  Same  
bug pops up in a lot of subject headers tells the team that there's a  
problem affecting a lot of users, and it's a big enough of an  
annoyance to get those users to write in about it.  The Revolution  
team then has to use its judgement about prioritizing the fixes.   
They know enough about the program to do that, and there's nothing  
about Bugzilla, as far as I see, that helps them do their job better.

Regards,

	Gregory

On Fri, Feb 24, 2006, at 10:10 AM, Thomas McGrath III:

> Dear Gregory,
>
> That would be like a few hundred people bringing an accountant
> hundreds of boxes of receipts from the past three years (some taxable
> and some not along with every bill too) and saying there was no real
> need for any kind of user contributed record keeping or for that
> matter questions and answers about their own expenses and then all of
> them at once saying "But where's my REFUND" I want it now, why didn't
> you prepare mine first, how come you did theirs first etc.
>
> (Just to keep it real and since you are an Associate Professor of
> Finance I thought the analogy would be close your heart)
>
> Regards,
>
> Tom
>
>
> On Feb 23, 2006, at 7:38 PM, Gregory Lypny wrote:
>
>> Well put, Dan.
>>
>> But I don't see the point of Bugzilla at all.  Seems to me that all
>> bugs, big and small, should to be fixed, and a simple word to the
>> Revolution people ought to be enough to get the ball rolling.
>>
>> 	Gregory Lypny
>>
>> 	Associate Professor of Finance
>> 	John Molson School of Business
>> 	Concordia University
>> 	Montreal, Canada