

Throw Away Your Bug Tracking System - locopati
http://wiki.apidesign.org/wiki/Bugzilla

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thejash
Kind of inflammatory post that boils down to one reason--there's no point in
having a bug tracking system if you're not going to address the bugs.

I disagree with this article. Especially if you're open source, you gain a lot
by having a bug tracking system:

1\. It's another way to get user feedback. Are people excitedly opening lots
of new enhancements, or frustratedly reporting lots of crashes? Building
community is extremely important.

2\. It's a way to MEASURE the priority of bugs. Are 30% of your users running
into this bug and piling on with "me too" comments? Then you'd better fix it.
If you keep closing bugs because you dont want to fix them, you wont see that
feedback.

3\. It's a way to organize your own thoughts and priorities. Is the new
feature X that you want REALLY more important than fixing the existing
functionality? How broken are things currently?

There's nothing wrong with leaving a bug open and making the comment that "it
will be a while before we fix this" I'm more likely to submit a patch in that
case, as a user.

~~~
houseabsolute
Basically, this article is about optimizing the developer experience rather
than the user experience. This seems to be a problem endemic in open source
software anyway, which is why so few people use it.

~~~
danieldk
"Basically, this article is about optimizing the developer experience rather
than the user experience."

Did you _ever_ use Bugzilla? Nothing is more detrimental to the user
experience...

Users would rather send support e-mails or use phone support. For the lack of
that in open source project, keep bug trackers simple. E.g. Github's
bugtracker is quite ok, it is fine for writing a bugreport and reacting to it.
But doesn't have all the bells and whistles that makes it complicated for
users.

~~~
houseabsolute
The article is not specifically about bugzilla, but issue trackers in general.

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rythie
As a user I find the way some of those bug tracking systems are used
infuriating. This seems to happen to me often:

    
    
      - You submit a bug or find one that's active and comment on it
      - there is no activity
      - then vendor posts needsinfo
      - info posted soon after
      - then ignored for while longer
      - reassigned
      - ignored for while longer
      - then closed because release is obsolete, need retesting in new release
    

This is mostly in RedHat's bug tracker, but elsewhere also.

~~~
rwmj
Why not help out triaging and fixing bugs then?

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rythie
At points I've submitted patches or very clear descriptions but they get
ignored still. In other projects there is often a steep learning curve to get
even a small patch in, like in Mozilla, particularly if it's a language you
don't normally use. I think in most projects it's simply not feasible to drop
in to do a couple of patches you really have to involved long term.

The only exception to this are security bugs where I've avoided the bug
tracker and typically got fast responses and fixes.

~~~
rwmj
OK, join the project and put the patches in yourself.

<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join>

~~~
rythie
OK, how do I join RedHat Enterprise? which is what we actually use and pay
money for therefore where I find the bugs.

I probably should join Mozilla, Ubuntu, KDE and Gnome too - that's going to be
a lot of catching up to do just to fix one bug in each.

Can you see what I'm saying? feedback is valuable to those projects but they
are ignoring it, if the only way people can get a bug fixed is by spending 10s
or 100s of hours getting involved, there is something wrong.

~~~
rwmj
If you contact Red Hat support you'll get immediate help. If you have a
support contract you shouldn't be filing bugs in Bugzilla, since the support
team will do that for you, and chase the developers to get things fixed. Your
support contract will make all this clear.

~~~
rythie
That's not been my experience, it's like in bugzilla but your oscillating
between "waiting on customer" and "waiting on redhat" and the people your
talking to don't really understand the problems and so have to ask someone
else everytime.

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Goladus
As a user I'd rather see a bug tracked even if it's not addressed. Sure, it's
frustrating to find a bug that's received no attention, but having the bug
tracked in a central location is one level of feedback better than nothing at
all.

~~~
adbge
As an end user, it's very helpful for me when a bug has been tracked even if
it's not addressed. When I run into some kind of weird behavior, I can just
check the bug tracker. If someone else has already reported the bug, it saves
me a significant amount of troubleshooting.

It's also pretty typical that users will post workarounds and patches in a bug
report. As you might imagine, this is hugely useful on a number of levels. It
makes it easier for project maintainers to fix the bug in question, and end
users with the problem are able to quickly resolve the issue.

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andreaja
This came to mind: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>

But that said, I feel for this guy. Big backlogs with low priority
enhancements masquerading as bugs are no fun.

There are some pretty big open source projects running without bug trackers,
they just keep an eye on the mailing list, and if a problem keeps cropping up,
it might get handled.

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thecoffeeman
Don't call it a bug tracking system. Call it a todo list.

