Proposal for a poll to users about bug triaging

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

I would argue this is not the most important thing, at least not before 
recruiting a proper QA team for your application. It does help with 
noticing duplicate reports, but it is quite work-intensive. In 
LibreOffice we currently have 657 meta reports to categorise everything. 
Yet, we also have 20-30 active QA persons shuffling things around.

Assigning correct components can very well be done gradually by 
increasingly educated and experienced non-developer QA contributors.

Having a lot of components makes it obvious that the Bugzilla interface 
needs some tweaking, at least Advanced search. The component selection 
field in there feels cramped and its width does not even resize to show 
the longer component names.

Red Hat has customised their BZ and added sub-components (so you have 
Product -> Component -> Sub-component). Their code is not yet public.

I think when wanting to have a fine-grained categorisation, it would be 
better to have only a handful of components and then a lot of *optional* 
sub-components. Bug reporters not knowing what to pick could skip the 
sub-component step.

I do not advise KDE to copy the LibreOffice model of meta reports. Meta 
reports don't live in the bug creation/search interface and are thus 
difficult to discover.

Ilmari

On 28.02.2018 13:49, Gilles Caulier wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Instead to start to talk with users about bugzilla, I recommend to 
> separate well the project with bugzilla sub-components.
> 
> In digiKam, i pass a lots of time to create sub-sections. This is the 
> most important task to do before triaging.
> 
> Remember that users are not developers. Some sections can be relevant of 
> some technical info from source code, so the developers must prepare the 
> sections before to delegate triaging to users. If users process a wrong 
> re-routage, this will be complex later to maintain a project.
> 
> See the sections created in bugzilla about digiKam project for example :
> 
> https://bugs.kde.org/editcomponents.cgi?product=digikam&showbugcounts=1
> 
> Best
> 
> Gilles Caulier
> 
> 2018-02-28 12:35 GMT+01:00 Ilmari Lauhakangas 
> <ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org 
> <mailto:ilmari.lauhakangas at libreoffice.org>>:
> 
>     I am personally convinced that users do not know bug triaging is a
>     thing and certainly not how much they could help developers by doing
>     it. It would be very useful to test this by running a poll on
>     https://blogs.kde.org/ or somewhere.
> 
>     Questions could be something along the lines of
>     "Did you know you can help KDE by analysing bug reports?"
>     "Did you know you can analyse most bug reports with regular user
>     skills?"
> 
>     Ilmari
> 
>