bugzilla, it's products, how they relate to projects. it's a mess...

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

On Monday, 29 January 12:16:07 UTC Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
>> On Monday, 29 January 2018 12:25:24 CET Harald Sitter wrote:
>> I don't like going to our bugzilla.
> 
> Me neither... But that's more because I have to triage about a 1000 bug
> reports a year, and many of them are not bug reports at all, but 
> support
> questions.

This sounds horrifying and should absolutely not be the case. Over at 
LibreOffice, an average full-time dev triages at most a 100 bugs per 
year from scratch (number pulled from my hat). Nearly all of the reports 
are first attacked by a ruthless gang of non-developers, numbering about 
20-30. Sure, there are some hybrid QA/dev beings, but they have usually 
"grown up" inside the tracker and started to lean more and more towards 
submitting patches.

As Nate has now attained demigod status with his usability blog posts, I 
think it would be good to take advantage of all the positive attention 
and tie it into one of the other goals "Streamlined onboarding of new 
contributors". The point has to be hammered home: "If you love some dev, 
set them free of the burden of bug triage".

Non-dev users often express themselves like they have an inferiority 
complex, "sadly I don't know C++ so I can't help" etc. They need to 
understand their amazing potential in something that is quite frankly a 
direct energy transfer to developers. Yet, compared to other non-dev 
tasks, QA does not require much to get started. You don't have to be 
able to express yourself in eloquent ways, it is enough to blurt out 
"Repro" or "No repro" in a hoarse voice every now and then.

Ilmari