bug reporting

Jon jbondy at sover.net
Sat Jul 9 17:55:07 EDT 2005


Mark:

If it's any consolation to you,

1) I was having a bad day, too; and
2) if I had it to do over again, I would have simply BZ'd the bug.

Sorry to have created such a ruckus: other traffic since has made it 
clear that my position is incorrect.

:)

Jon

Mark Wieder wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>



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