[Libreoffice-qa] Enhancements - Getting User Input

[Robinson Tryon]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 4:35 AM, Petr Mladek <pmladek at suse.cz> wrote:
> I am afraid that this could not work easily. If we do the work and
> select 10-15 nice features and find potential volunteers, we probably do
> not need voting. There will be most likely different volunteers for the
> different features.

ok, interesting.

> If they wanted to work on them, they would work on
> them independently on the voting results.
>

Hmm... I imagine that some of the volunteers might like a little
guidance as to what bugs/issues are most affecting our users right
now?

> The voting is always dangerous because it reflects only opinion of the
> voters. We have millions users and I am afraid that only few hundreds
> would vote. The voting would crate a commitment for TDF but I am not
> sure about the profit.

Right now we don't have any voting and (essentially) no visible input
from the users as to what should be fixed first. I believe that Joel
told me that the devs *kind of* look at the bug stats, # of people
cc'd, etc... and use that as input into prioritization, but there's no
hard and fast rule.

Voting can be dangerous for multiple reasons:
- ballot stuffing
- low sample size
- etc..

But there are definitely ways to mitigate some of these issues. One
way is to get more users to sign up for FDO which, coincidentally,
means that we have more users who can easily enter new bugs :-)
Another method would be to use random sampling of our users (perhaps
weighted a little by contributions to FDO, the wiki, Ask, git, etc..).

> PS: I feel a bit bad that we are so negative about this idea. It is
> great that you come up with ideas how to improve things.

>From my perspective, I think that we need to generate a lot more ideas
about how to improve things, even if we have to shoot down 90% of them
for one reason or another. User involvement is key to us growing our
ranks, and is an important piece of a healthy software community.

> Well, in this
> case, I would be more careful. We were not sure whether to enable voting
> for bugs. We decided to hide it a bit under "affects me" flag. Let's see
> how this works before playing with voting on more fronts :-)

+1

Speaking of which: How did the discussion w/ESC go?

--R