Let's get rid of UNCONFIRMED/CONFIRMED

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tuesday, 27 February 2018 20:15:40 CET Martin Flöser wrote:

> 
> As KWin has the same problem as Krita I can also answer. In the case of
> KWin about 90 % of the incoming bug reports is not a bug, but either
> duplicate, driver crash, useless crash reports from Arch users or user
> support questions. I as the maintainer handle this. Just imagine in a
> corporate world having the product owner or developer with largest
> domain knowledge handle the first level user support. No company would
> do that because it's a waste of time and money. We as a free software
> community still practice this.
> 
> So where should users report bugs? Not anywhere where the developers
> look for bugs.

Which is why I'm handling bugzilla, mostly, with Dmitry only looking at 
bugzilla when I ask him too, and for the rest, just phabricator. I'm trying to 
shield my most productive developer from the interaction with useless reports.

Even so, he often comes to me with "some man on vk reported a bug...".

> We need an efficient support portal which can handle the
> 90 % of requests which create the noise. If the users truly report a
> bug, then it could be forwarded to the developers. With a corporate
> style workflow going from first level support (taking the issue), to
> second level support (figuring out whether it's a bug) and then to third
> level support (developers).

The big problem is finding someone who can make the judgement calls. Bug 
reports are often worded so weirdly that you do need the ten years of 
experience to be able to guess what the reporter means, and in which category 
of frequently reported misconception the report falls.

> Due to the high level of noise there is also a lot of conflict
> potential. I operate on the assumption that any incoming bug report is
> not valid. This is experience based. If > 90 % of the reports are not
> valid you start to get a feeling that the next bug won't be valid
> either. So bugs get closed, closed with short sentence. Feature requests
> dismissed, etc. Sometimes answered on a tablet or smartphone with too
> short answers. Things escalate, we need to bring in the CWG. That's all
> quite common to the very frustrating and demotivating bug wrangling
> process. I'm sure the situation would be better if the developers would
> not interact directly with the users, but if a first or second level
> support team acts as an intermediate for it.
> 
> Cheers
> Martin


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | https://www.valdyas.org | https://www.krita.org