[Chandler-dev] Re: instructions for dogfooders

[Davor Cubranic]

I think many of points Andre brings up in favour of such a list are 
better kept to the bugzilla itself (e.g., detecting duplicates), but 
overall I agree that it's a good idea.

Davor


Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
> Hi Andre,
>
> Aha! I didn't understand that you meant a mailing list for dogfooders.
>
> I agree with you that a community of technically skilled 
> users/dogfooders helping out other users/dogfooders would be a real 
> asset to the project. It is indeed frustrating to have a bug parked at 
> "works for me" when the bug still occurs for the person dogfooding -- 
> I can see how a forum for discussing the bug would be helpful. You 
> bring up a good point that we have a window of a few months to think 
> through the mechanics about how we'll support early adopters.
>
> Anyone else have 2c on whether now is the time to start up such a 
> list, in advance of Preview?
>
> Anything else that would be helpful in establishing such a community? 
> We weren't really ready for that in the past, but Chandler is now 
> stable enough that we can start pushing on that as a goal.
>
> Is "works for me" the right resolution for bugs the developers can't 
> reproduce but we know happen for end users? If not, how should we 
> handle these bugs? (Mail bugs in particular seem prone to this kind of 
> situation).
>
> Cheers,
> Katie
>
> Andre Mueninghoff wrote:
>> Hi Katie,
>>
>> Thanks for your interest. A little of both, I think, if I understand
>> your example options.
>>
>> My goal is possibly the same as yours, that is, to maximize OSAF
>> developer productivity towards new features and functions, as compared
>> to following up on bug reports that have questionable reproducibility
>> instructions at best, or have a root cause in a misconfigured user
>> environment at worst. It seems to me there might be/are probably others
>> like me who encounter issues that occur more than once, but are unable
>> to reproduce these issues consistently such to be able to craft a
>> coherent bug report for further investigation by a developer. I think
>> there may be an opportunity to provide a bit of structure to the
>> community of "some-what technical, but non-developer" dogfooders through
>> perhaps a list. It could happen, for example, that more
>> technically-skilled dogfooders step in are assist others in
>> distinguishing between known issues (a.k.a. duplicate bug prevention),
>> user environment issues, and user expectation mismatches (expectations
>> speeding ahead of the release plan). Dogfooders might be able to assist
>> each other in verifying instructions for reproducing issues, all prior
>> to intial triage <grin> by the developer(s) covering the relevant
>> component. It seems to me that developers and dogfooders share a common
>> lack of interest in bug research that results in a "works for me" tag
>> though the dogfooder continues to experience the issue. The opportunity
>> for OSAF as preview approaches is to shape and manage actively the
>> expectations of the eventual beta users by working out in advance the
>> mechanics of the support of early adopters. Hope that makes sense and is
>> helpful.
>>
>> Please let me know if you have any questions.
>> Thanks, Andre
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
> Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev