[VOTE] Tool Palette dissapear randomly Report #8500

[J. Landman Gay]

Bernard Devlin wrote:
> But from what you're saying it seems to me
> that the voting system is being re-purposed.

Not exactly. I was basing it on a discussion I had with Mark Waddingham, 
who bemoaned the fact that votes don't give him much indication of what 
to work on next. The voting system hasn't really changed, but people 
haven't been using it as intended. This makes it hard for the engineers 
to triage the bug fixes. They can't fix everything immediately, so they 
use several different ways to determine what to prioritize. One of those 
things (but not the only thing) is how many people are actually affected 
by an issue. Crashes always get top priority, but after that they need 
to figure out how widespread the impact of a bug is. Votes were intended 
to give them some indication of that.

Feature requests are probably a little different. Votes on those show 
how many people would like and use the proposed new feature. But even 
so, the team would prefer that you vote on feature requests only if 
you're pretty sure it would make a difference in the type of work you 
do. I'm guessing that there's more flexibility here; we don't always 
know what a future project may need. But if your work is mostly with 
databases, for example, and a feature request involves, say, animation, 
maybe you shouldn't necesarily vote on that one regardless of how good a 
feature it might be.

Basically what he was saying was that if the voting system doesn't 
reflect the user experience, the votes don't give them much to go on. 
He's also concerned that people might vote because someone asks them to, 
which skews the count even more. A list member may be able to gather a 
number of votes for a pet bug, all from people who were never affected 
by it, but who want to support a friend.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com