Re: Bug reporting [Was: Promoting greater integration between testers!:)]

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 16:20, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Owen Taylor">
> 
> > I have a hard time imagining that a triage team of non-programmers could
> > save more time for GTK+'s portion of bugzilla than the time spent guiding
> > them along. 
> 
> (See reply to Luis... I said "triaging/testing" which implies a level of
> knowledge greater than that required for most user facing product triage
> tasks...)

Hmm, not really sure what you mean by testing. Verification of 
RESOLVED/FIXED bugs would be nice, but unless we started getting a lot
more regressions than we get now, not a high priority for me.

Development of test cases for submitted bugs is important, but generally
is the responsibility of the submitter ... usually it's the most
important part of finding out what the bug is actually about.

> > I'd love to have more programmers going through GTK+ bugzilla, but I want
> > them fixing bugs, not categorizing bugs for the existing hackers to fix.
> 
> I'm suggesting that this might be a reasonable stepping stone to shift from
> bug tester to bug fixer. We need more hackers, we need to think about ways
> of attracting hackers, we can't expect hackers to explode, fully-formed out
> of freak lightning strikes and nuclear waste

No? It's worked surprisingly well so far. :-)

> so finding easy tasks to give new contributors interesting responsibilities, 
> understanding of project processes, contact with established hacker mentors, 
> and easy paths to knowledge is important.

Right now, I think now for GTK+ it's mostly just executing on the
fundementals:

 - Review patches quickly
 - Document
 - Delegate authority where possible

Beyond that, given a few hours a week, what I'd probably try to do is
publish an easy-fix list for GTK+. (If you query for PATCH_NEEDED,
that's a roughly the right result.)

Regards,
						Owen