[Libreoffice-qa] Send Feedback...and BSA ideas

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 07:07:36PM -0700, Joel Madero wrote:
> b) Robinson's main point about ask site is that they don't have the man
> power to be QA's screeners - I think that summarizes his stance in the
> nicest way possible :) Basically what we are doing is asking the Ask admins
> to be QA screeners or for QA to get involved with Ask which - if we do
> that, they might as well just report on FDO and QA can avoid getting used
> to the dealings over in the Ask world.

You might get some "accidental" confirmation by this though:

- people will find dupes
- people will post "happens to me too"s
- people will upvote things that they can confirm

and all of this can happen without breaking the conventions of ask, while e.g.
"me too"s are (rightfully) frowned upon on bugzilla and we have no votes on
bugzilla.

> If we just send people to ask, they report what is a bug but that has to
> first wait for Ask site admins to clear it as a bug, then either send them
> over to FDO or if Robinson made a button that just said "this looks like a
> bug" but doesn't actually do the confirmation so it just jumps over to FDO
> as an UNCONFIRMED bug waiting for QA to tackle it....this seems very time
> consuming.

I think a "move to fdo" should not happen for unconfirmed reports there, but
only for those implicitly or explicitly confirmed by feedback from others. I
even wonder, if _not_ having a button there would be better. Once a askbot
question can be promoted to a bug, we can ask the reporter to do so, offering
help along the way. This:
- is a positive thing for him/her as it acknowledges the issue he has
- as help is offered directly, he/she is more confident to ask back
- thus we grow another member how is:
  - able to use bugzilla
  - able to teach others about it on ask

"Give a man a fish and he will have food for a day. Teach a man ..."

> I'm not sure if other Ask admins have an opinion but I think they (whoever
> you are) should be involved with this conversation if we're asking them to
> do more work.

http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/users/by-group/3/everyone/

Note that while QA members do not see this anymore as they are used to it,
askbots free form is a _lot_ easier to understand than bugzilla or even BSA for
your average user, were filling out stuff needs you to have understood quite a
few concepts about release cycles, software development, QA in general.

OTOH, I missed out bugzilla/BSA completely from my proposal at the end of the
last mail. Never having stuff go in directly via BSA would be bad too and it
would block the migration of enduser to slowly turn into contributors. As such,
it might be better to do it like this:

 - LibreOffice made me sad!
  - Was LibreOffice doing something unexpected or can we help you solving a
    specific problem?
    => askbot, unanswered question
  - Was there a clearly reproducable wrong behaviour (bug) you would like to
    report? (for advanced users, if unsure use the option above)
    => BSA
  - No, I have a different/generic complaint.
    => these are tricky. Reply to email "Thanks for your feedback" and then
    send to some private mailing list, for some poor sob to parse through?

This allows people to go for the BSA(*) when they are reasonably sure about
themselves, but also allows them to use askbot as fallback (e.g. run into BSA,
dont understand what it says, but remembering is for "advanced users", thus
going back and go with askbot instead).

I think the key here is to have a nicely sloped learning curve with no
insurmountable barriers along the way, where you need the tunnel effect to get
through. ;)

Best,

Bjoern

(*) And _that_ will lead them to bugzilla, if there is any discussion on the
    bug. And there almost always is.