Better Open Source Communities Through Data 35
An anonymous reader writes "Using exhaust data from Bugzilla, David Eaves describes how the Mozilla Metrics team is creating dashboards to improve the contributor experience and give open source community managers better situational awareness."
I, for one, (Score:1)
welcome our new Star Trek android overlord!
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Bugzilla alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)
While it's great that Bugzilla is provding this, I'm wondering if anyone can post their experience with Bugzilla alternatives.
Bugzilla's great ... for developers.
Is there anything that could be just to allow customers to directly enter bugs? Something Trac-like?
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Mantis is definitely much better from a user perspective; not sure I'm sold on the tracker itself though.
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Or do you just mean that it's more difficult/daunting for them to use Bugzilla? In that case, what you have there is a feature, not a bug. Make it too easy, you'll get a bug filed for every little thing (and they won't check for duplicates first, either).
That said, all KDE apps support filing bugs through Help > Report Bug. (I'd tell you what that uses if I were in KDE right now, but I'm not. Sorry.)
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I'd take a Google-style issues tracker over Bugzilla any day. The problem with Bugzilla is that nobody keeps it up to date properly - take Trillian's Bugzilla, for instance - reporting an issue on the Android app during its beta phase... no appropriate entries for categorization (Android missing from OS, ARM missing from architecture, Android versions missing from app version section, and so on and so forth...).
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What, customers can't file bugs in Bugzilla?
I've been programming for 15 years and *I* can't figure out how to do anything useful with bugzilla...
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I recommend fdisk.
Re:Bugzilla alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't cope with large numbers of bug reports from non-technical people then your bug tracking system is broken. There is no better way to piss off users/customers than by making it impossible for them to report the problems they are having.
Re:Bugzilla alternatives (Score:4, Interesting)
Best of all, is when random strangers with the same bug, find my blogged bug report instead of the bug database, and then start posting comments on it.
Years ago, a friend of mine showed me the "killer app for Python", and it was the stack traces. When their (Python-based) product crashed in the field, its driver would bundle it all up in a zip file, and ask the user for permission to forward it to the developers, with the usual reassurances that all data discovered in the process would be treated as confidential. Bug report arrives, the stack trace (with variables etc, it's Python, right?) contains all the necessary info, the next interaction with the customer, is to tell them where to download the bug-fixed version of the product. "No time wasted on annoying human interaction, customer thinks we are attentive geniuses, everyone productive and happy."
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If you can't cope with large numbers of bug reports from non-technical people then your application is broken.
FTFY
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Redmine is about as user friendly a system as I have come across.
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-jason
OTRS (Score:2)
try OTRS, its clean, friendly for users and the developers/agents have also a good interface
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Really? (Score:2)
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If you look at the screenshots, only the first one shows emails. The other ones have them elided.
That first screenshot is the list of the top 20 or so contributors to the Mozilla project over the past year. Those e-mail addresses are all over the hg log for the project, the public project mailing lists, etc. So they're not exactly a secret...
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I assumed that "exhaust data" is the data that gets discarded by a lossy compression engine. I mean, that data's gotta go somewhere, right?
And that's why the air coming out of desktop computers smells faintly of ozone.
"exhaust data" is why a dog sniffs your butt. (Score:1)
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>>"exhaust data", "quantitatively asses"... I think these guys need smarter spell checkers.
These guys are dealing with the ass end of customer service. For free.
I think they're allowed to make fart jokes all they want.
But then again, they steadfastly refuse to give users the option to disable tabs (AFAICT). At least there's still a status bar, mostly.
Bingo! (Score:4, Funny)
Does it also leverage state-of-the art paradigms shifts in order to deliver an exponential breakthrough experience?
Re:Bingo! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, it does have pretty charts.
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Congrats Mozilla, you just turned your community to a patch quantity competition.
That's right. This is the exact opposite of making contributors feel appreciated. How this can be candy-wrapped and promoted as glad tidings is beyond me. They seem to have decided they don't need a community any more.
This is more about limiting the ability of people to participate in Bugzilla (based on rating-based reputation score) because of the cost in developer time in having to wade through comments from people who don't really add anything by certain measures, and, eventually, justifying removal o
Ohloh (Score:2)
Hey look, Mozilla re-invented http://www.ohloh.net/ [ohloh.net] and it only works for Mozilla. How useful.