Community technical support mailing list was retired 2010 and replaced with a professional technical support team. For assistance please contact: Pre-sales Technical support via email to sales@march-hare.com.
Tony Hoyle wrote: >> You're probably talking about the noise in a bug database with public >> report access. That's really sad, because one would think that open >> source would actually make this easier, with having many more >> reporters. > > You have more reporters but even after filtering out the noise, many of > them never respond - I lost count of the number of bugs I had to close > because I couldn't replicate and the reporter never responded to > requests for more information. Some (perhaps many) of these will have > been genuine issues. > > It's perfectly understandable really.. the people reporting have real > jobs, and they're just motivated to report a bug because something > didn't work for them.. they're not professional testers or anything. Makes sense -- but I wouldn't say that this is a bad thing. You got notified of the issue. Now you have basically four cases: 1- The reporter works with you and together you can nail it down to a real problem. Good. 2- The reporter works with you and together you find out that he did something wrong. That could have been something non-obvious, and may lead to better documentation. Good. Or it was something obvious, and you lost time. Bad. 3- The reporter doesn't work with you (never responds) but you can replicate the problem. Good. 4- The reporter doesn't work with you, and you can't replicate the problem. You lost some time trying to, but there was the chance that you could have. And there is the chance that some other user has this or a similar problem, and then you can find out what the issue was. In any case, not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not trying to push you into any direction here :) I'm just throwing in my POV. But I never worked with a bug database open to the public for reporting, so there may be issues I have yet to experience. OTOH quite a number of projects do this, and it seems to work well in many cases. But then, this is a matter of work style, too... Gerhard