help desk vs bug tracker
Boudewijn Rempt
boud at valdyas.org
Mon Oct 29 14:31:35 GMT 2018
Hi,
Right now, we're getting lots of user support questions in bugzilla, and at
the Krita sprint we were discussing whether it wouldn't be better to have a
kind of in-between system. Either something that works like a proper helpdesk,
or something like askbot, or both. But we just cannot handle the need for user
support with our existing tools anymore.
Askbot would be a replacement for user support questions in the forums,
something the forum isn't really suited for since it makes it extremely hard
find questions that were already asked. https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/
questions/ shows how that would work. Problem is, we cannot have a single ask
site for all of KDE, there would have to be specialed sites like
ask.krita.org, which might be a whole lot of work to maintain.
As for a helpdesk system vs bugzilla: we get too many user support questions
in bugzilla, like https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399639 or https://
bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399494.
Making bugzilla user-friendly is a laudable effort, but it still leads to
reports that are useless for developers: and answering questions on bugzilla
is a lot of effort because there's no real flow of question, asking for info,
giving an answer. There are no canned repsonses, and no "smart" system that
would suggest the canned response for frequently asked questions, or an easy
way to link people to the documentation.
We discussed mitigrating strategies for bugzilla, like including a reporting
wizard in the application itself, but the problem remains: bugzilla is not
helpdesk software, but a bug tracker. It's a developmen tool, not a user
support tool.
A good helpdesk system would have:
* no reporter login
* scriptable "wizards" to get the basic info
* canned responses
* ideally, machine learning to suggest the right canned response for faqs
* a knowledge base where reporters can search (replaces FAQ pages)
* a q/a site where users can help other uses (included or separately: askbot,
http://question2answer.org/ or stackexchange)
* easy conversion from a helpdesk ticket to a bug report
* easy conversion from a helpdesk ticket to a kb entry
We looked at vailable open source solutions:
* helpy.io
* otrs.org
* osticket.com
All of them are open-core opensource solutions :-(. I wonder whether we've
missed any options. I'm also wondering whether other KDE projects have the
seem need as we have for Krita, of separating support questions from bug
reports. If that isn't a big issue for other projects, maybe we should start
with an ask.krita.org instance and see what happens then.
--
https://www.krita.org
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