bug reporting

[Mark Wieder]

Dan-

Saturday, July 9, 2005, 9:34:17 AM, you wrote:

DS> I think this is a case where it's not an either-or, but a both-and.

DS> Customers will complain in all kinds of places. A company with  
DS> appropriate resources should attempt to monitor major lists -- most
DS> particularly one like this that they host -- for negative feedback
DS> and translate that feedback into bug reports for the development  
DS> staff as often as possible.

DS> OTOH, users who care about the product -- and I certainly agree with
DS> Mark here that they are few and far between although there seem to be
DS> a disproportionate number around this place! -- should and most often
DS> will use the official bug reporting mechanism, provided that  
DS> mechanism isn't a nightmare.

DS> My problem is that Revzilla/Bugzilla is a user interface nightmare
DS> that more often than not confuses me more than the bug I'm trying to
DS> report. So I'd say that unless I find a bug that's really severe, I
DS> find a way to work around it, post something here and get on with my
DS> programming life.

RevZilla takes the pain out of the BZ database, in my experience.
Obviously, YMMV. Give it another try if you haven't lately. IMO it's
at least as easy to use as the major defect-tracking packages out
there, and as a QA engineer I've used most of them by now.

DS> So, Jon, you're not entirely wrong here. From off-list communications
DS> we have had I know you are a serious developer (Mark was probably
DS> just in a bad mood; he's a genuinely nice guy) but one who doesn't
DS> (yet at least) have a passionate supportive feeling about Revolution.
DS> Hopefully you'll be able to find the time to develop such a feeling.

Yes. I was in a bad mood. I still am.

This list exists for users to help each other out. When I've got an
issue and think it might be something to file a bug report on, I'll
ask here first to see if someone can confirm it or if it's just my
inexperience with things or some other kind of user error. That's the
sort of brainstorming I see here all the time and it works well.

When I see someone who can't be bothered filing bug reports showing up
here and bitching about things because supposedly someone is
monitoring the list, that's hijacking the listserv for a different
purpose. Jon's found some good bugs in the IDE here - that's what
prompted my original comment about Bugzillaing them. I'd like to see
some of them fixed, and for that they need to be in the bug database.
Tracking bugs by listservs just doesn't work.

Look - there's more to software development than slapping some code
together, hoping it works, and exposing your users to it, waiting for
them to complain about bugs. That's the sort of amateurishness and
arrogance I'd expect from Microsoft. There's tracking and prioritizing
defects, technical support, version control, etc. Posting issues to a
listserv can be part of the process, but Jon's arrogant response of
"that's all it should take", even if that's the way he treats his own
customers, is not something I would expect from anyone who considers
themselves a professional. It shows a fair amount of ignorance of the
development process.

I agree with what you said here. It's not an either-or thing. But if I
ran the company (and you can all breathe a sigh of relief that I
don't), I'd put more resources into finding and fixing bugs that are
in the bug database than into having people keep an eye on listservs
and such. There's an existing mechanism for reporting bugs and the bug
list is public, which is something you don't often find outside of
open-source projects. If bugs don't get reported properly there's a
minimal chance of them getting tracked and fixed.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net