[Libreoffice] EasyHack: Improved bug filing form / flow

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Daniel,

On Fri, 2011-02-18 at 22:32 -0500, Daniel Neel wrote:
> Ok, a quick status update on this. Have been working on it some more -
> the current code is available at http://dneelyep.webs.com . Notes on
> the current progress below.

	Ooh :-) it looks really sweet ! This is a great start Daniel.

> Added a Submit button - not currently setup to bring up a pre-filled
> bug report.

	I wonder, if we can't avoid showing the bugzilla page entirely - and
simply provide a nicer whizzy front-end for that.

> Does anyone have more suggestions by chance to improve this? I'm
> definitely interested :).

	Yes; making it more lush and graphical would be good for a start. As an
example - the process of binary chopping documents down is really useful
to understand - IMHO we need more documentation on that, perhaps with a
picture of a document being chopped to help people understand.

	I think we probably also need to make the questions easier to
understand (think expert friendly, but idiot proof), of course this will
require a lot of thought to get the taxonomy right:

Radio buttons:
	( ) can you crash LibreOffice somehow ?
	( ) does your document not look right when it is loaded ?
	( ) did other people have trouble reading the document
	    you sent ?
	( ) is there an unpleasant user interaction that makes it
	    difficult to use ?
	[ if several of these, please file multiple reports ]

	I would also tend to hide everything else (including the submit
button) until the data is useful - so people have a fairly linear flow.

	( ) can you crash LibreOffice somehow ?
		( ) does this happen when you load or save a certain
		    document ?
			+ link to making minimal documents blurb :-)
		( ) is there a simple set of steps, and button clicks
		    that can crash with no document loaded ?
			+ link to how-to-get-stacktrace documentation
		( ) is the crash intermittent and un-predictable ?
			+ link to how-to-get-stacktrace documentation

	( ) does your document not look right when it is loaded ?
		+ link to making minimal documents blurb
		[x] I am certain that I have the correct fonts installed
		    on the system for this document
			+ link to fc-list (Linux), and Mac/Win details
			+ NB. the 'font' drop-down in LO lies - we
			  should explain that.
		+ ask for screenshots before / after of the problem

	( ) did other people have trouble reading the document
	    you sent ?
		( ) Do you have the original document in OpenDocument
		    format ?
			No == very hard to work out what went wrong.
			can you try to reproduce what you did, and
			first save it in ODF, before exporting ...
			Yes == link to producing minimal document
		        description ;-)

	( ) is there an unpleasant user interaction that makes it
	    difficult to use ?
		+ no idea where to go here I guess.	

	I suspect we could avoid asking which component is involved, and just
look at up-loaded test document / file extensions in many cases to
auto-select the component.

	I liked your proxies for severity: "causes loss of content" etc. -
asking people the severity of their bug is almost never a good idea :-)
[ which is why I like the plan to hide the actual bug form from them ].

	Anyhow - this is a really sexy initiative :-) Hopefully we can get some
more artwork support from the design team, to actually make it fun /
pretty to file really good bugs.

	What can we do to make it easier to file ? eg. can we wrap the account
creation flow in some pleasant way ? Perhaps that should be step #1 -
without an E-mail address and a real account, it is fairly pointless
filing a bug IMHO.

	Thanks !

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot