[TriLUG] Issue Tracking

[Brandon Van Every]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Brian McCullough <bdmc at buadh-brath.com>wrote:

>
> Because of the wide variation in user types, the UI needs to be simple.
> Even us techy types can appreciate that.
>

I've used Trac and Mantis plenty of times to file bugs / features for other
people's open source projects.  There's nothing wrong with their UIs; they
work.  Trying to "simplify" these UIs is overthinking things.  You pick
stuff from drop-down menus, that's about it.  People who claim to be
"non-technical" must be forced to do a proper QA drill if it's within their
area of responsibility.  This includes submitting information in all fields
so that it's actually useful, and providing steps to reproduce the problem.
 Such issues are cultural and cannot be solved by "simpler" UIs.  In
volunteer open source culture, techies who do not do all the steps are
yelled at, until they start doing the right thing.  This is normal and open
source culture doesn't work if techies don't internalize the need to carry
their own weight.

For non-techs who are *not* responsible for filing bugs, you may wish to
have a mailing list or web form interface that goes into some database
somewhere and notifies various people.  I have no experience with this.
 All of the open source projects I've watched over the years have typically
abandoned such interfaces, because volunteer open source works best when
people are flogged into providing useful bug reports.  But if you have
associates or customers who aren't paid to write good bug reports / feature
requests, then simply communicating with them by fairly standard means,
i.e. email, to hold their hands and get something useful out of them, may
serve you better.

Some companies have a culture where they put all their TODO items in a bug
tracker.  Others use wikis, chat, email, or face-to-face meetings.  Getting
people to pay attention, monitor, and respond to any method of
dissemination, and getting everyone using *the same* method of
dissemination, is a challenging managerial problem.  No technology will
solve the problem for you.  In particular, as a bug tracker fills up, a
huge backlog develops.  Even when triaged, people are going to tune out
some of that, because trying to actually deal with all bugs / features in a
tracker would lead most human beings to despair.  Managerially, you might
be better off limiting the flow of TODO information to a simple stream of
emails - and don't send out so many emails!  If people have hundreds of
emails in their Inboxes every day, as the hive mind of the Microsoft campus
once had (I'm told secondhand), people will ignore them.

In addition to Trac and Mantis, Bugzilla seems popular and I doubt it's
lacking anything.  Pick one and just do it.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every