[Libreoffice-qa] [libreoffice-website] Ask: How can we interoperate with QA and Bugzilla?

[Joel Madero]

On 04/13/2013 06:02 PM, Robinson Tryon wrote:
> [cc'd QA list as this is relevant to their interests]
>
> One of the perennial questions about the Ask site is "How do we
> interoperate with QA (and the QA Team) and Bugzilla?"
>
> We often get questions on the Ask site such as this:
>
> http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/16015/excel-xml-2003-file-gives-general-error/
>> I have a file in 2003 xml format that Excel happily accepts but
>> LibreOffice gives a General error when it tries to open it. Any
>> ideas?
> It would be easy to send the user directly to FDO, but the bug tracker
> can be a scary place. Often we send a user over there, and they ping
> us back on the Ask site when they haven't received a response to their
> bug. Sometime their bug will get marked 'NEEDINFO' or 'NO REPRO', but
> the user might not know what they need to do next.
>
> I think that the QA Team and the active users of the Ask site need to
> get a bit more friendly, and perhaps share some ideas about how to
> best help our users. If you think about it, we do a lot of the same
> things:
>
> - Users come to us with problems
> - We try to triage the reports
> - We ask for more information
> - We try to provide solutions or find someone who can
>
> One thing that could help our process would be to make it easier to
> take a question from the Ask site and send it to FDO.

yes indeed this would be great. I think one pointer can be asking users 
to add the link to their ask page in the URL section of FDO - this will 
alert triagers/QA staff that this originated on Ask site.


>
> I've started some guidelines on when we should send a Question to
> FDO[1], but I'd like more input from our contributors. The bugtracker
> is really optimal for things like
> - reproducing bugs
> - keeping track of the details required for repro (OS, LO version, etc..)
> - interacting with developers
>
> To improve the guidelines, it would be great to have QA folks use the
> Ask site more, and have Ask site members be more involved with QA. I
> know that a number of people on the Ask site are already involved in
> QA, including Pedro, Manfred, Rainer, etc.., and I know that I've seen
> QA folks such as Joren and Joel over on the Ask site :-)
Only a tiny bit ;) I think we can/should ask ALL members of QA to get 
familiar with Ask and ALL contributors from the ask site to get familiar 
with FDO (including starting an account and perhaps triaging a little so 
they get familiar with how to "recommend" users to create good bug 
reports that don't get tossed back into NEEDINFO state.
>
> If anyone has suggestions on how we can improve our communication or
> collaboration, please ping me directly or via the list. I'd like to
> hear from more of you!

My suggestion is to start by encouraging both sides to get familiar with 
the counterpart (FDO people get familiar with Ask, Ask get familiar with 
FDO). Once we are familiar we can come up with concrete ideas to make 
interoperability better. I really like the idea of an Ask button that 
generates a bug report - perhaps making it submit through BSA would 
work? Should we get Rob involved with this discussion?

Another thing is I think that people at Ask should encourage very active 
users to go from user to contributor - QA side has gotten quite direct 
about asking users to get involved and it has been relatively 
successful. I'm not sure if this is the case with Ask but in general, 
both teams need more people.
>
> Together, I think that we can improve both the Ask site and QA, and
> make the LibreOffice support system a less scary and more responsive
> experience for our users.

I completely agree with this - perhaps some basic tutorials are in 
demand, walkthroughs of how to use FDO and how to use Ask properly. 
Maybe documentation can help us there,  else we can tackle it ourselves.


Best,
Joel