Messages in this thread | | | From | "Roland" <> | Subject | Re: Tracking and crediting bug reporters | Date | Thu, 15 May 2008 10:02:07 +0200 |
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On Monday, 12 of May 2008, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > Several members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board > recently > got together with Andrew Morton to talk about kernel quality issues. One > of the things which came out of that meeting was a desire to improve > incentives for people who report bugs. Clearly, actually fixing those > bugs > would qualify; nobody has lost sight of that. But it was suggested that > the creation and publication of statistics on bug reporting would also > help. > > One way to do this might be for Andrew (being the only one who actually > reads every message posted on the list) to keep a spreadsheet along with > everything else he does. That idea did not go over very well. > > So here's what we would like to try instead. Whenever somebody sends up a > patch fixing a reported bug, the name of the person who reported the bug > would be immortalized with this tag: > > Reported-by: A. Bug Reporter <email@goes.here> > > In particular, reporters who work with the developers toward the > resolution > of the bug should be thanked in this way. If we wanted to take things > further, perhaps we could add a Bisected-by: tag for really hard-core > helpers. > > If these tags go into the commit messages in any sort of consistent way, > it > should be possible generate the usual sort of statistics from them. I'll > then happily publicize them next to the traditional lists of people who > are > adding new bugs. The result will certainly be fame, fortune, and job > offers for the people at the top of the list. Or something like that. > > If the rest of the community is agreeable, it would be nice to make an > immediate start on this; it's not yet too late to get reasonable data for > the 2.6.26 kernel, and to have the habits well ingrained for 2.6.27. > > Thoughts?
very good idea !
anyhow, i`m browsing trough bugzilla for some time and try helping where i can and there is one thing which is really noticeable:
there are bugreports not being worked on systematically enough and reporters often don`t feel welcome there. i saw bug reports which didn`t get a reply for a year or so. somebody excused for "posting so much" - all he did was posting a proper description of his problem.
improving of bugzilla handling would be another incentive for bug reporter, imho.
someone who reports a bug there and never gets a response (not even a formal "thanks for your report....") will probably never report again.
i have worked for support (software product) some time ago and i learned one thing there:
there needs to be someone to keep track of the users` input and to keep track of the developers action/response.
bugreporters forget about their bug if they found a workaround (buying new hardware or whatever) and developers mostly prefer working on new code rather than fixing issues. that`s not true for ever user or developer, but if you really want bugs get fixed, someone acting as a mediator is essential. . regards roland
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