Re: Tracking and crediting bug reporters

From: Roland
Date: Thu May 15 2008 - 04:02:38 EST


On Monday, 12 of May 2008, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
Several members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board recently
got together with Andrew Morton to talk about kernel quality issues. One
of the things which came out of that meeting was a desire to improve
incentives for people who report bugs. Clearly, actually fixing those bugs
would qualify; nobody has lost sight of that. But it was suggested that
the creation and publication of statistics on bug reporting would also
help.

One way to do this might be for Andrew (being the only one who actually
reads every message posted on the list) to keep a spreadsheet along with
everything else he does. That idea did not go over very well.

So here's what we would like to try instead. Whenever somebody sends up a
patch fixing a reported bug, the name of the person who reported the bug
would be immortalized with this tag:

Reported-by: A. Bug Reporter <email@xxxxxxxxx>

In particular, reporters who work with the developers toward the resolution
of the bug should be thanked in this way. If we wanted to take things
further, perhaps we could add a Bisected-by: tag for really hard-core
helpers.

If these tags go into the commit messages in any sort of consistent way, it
should be possible generate the usual sort of statistics from them. I'll
then happily publicize them next to the traditional lists of people who are
adding new bugs. The result will certainly be fame, fortune, and job
offers for the people at the top of the list. Or something like that.

If the rest of the community is agreeable, it would be nice to make an
immediate start on this; it's not yet too late to get reasonable data for
the 2.6.26 kernel, and to have the habits well ingrained for 2.6.27.

Thoughts?

very good idea !

anyhow, i`m browsing trough bugzilla for some time and try helping
where i can and there is one thing which is really noticeable:

there are bugreports not being worked on systematically enough and
reporters often don`t feel welcome there.
i saw bug reports which didn`t get a reply for a year or so.
somebody excused for "posting so much" - all he did was posting a
proper description of his problem.

improving of bugzilla handling would be another incentive for bug reporter,
imho.

someone who reports a bug there and never gets a response (not even a formal
"thanks for your report....") will probably never report again.

i have worked for support (software product) some time ago and i
learned one thing there:

there needs to be someone to keep track of the users` input and to keep
track of the developers action/response.

bugreporters forget about their bug if they found a workaround (buying
new hardware or whatever) and developers mostly prefer working on
new code rather than fixing issues. that`s not true for ever user or developer,
but if you really want bugs get fixed, someone acting as a mediator is essential.
.
regards
roland

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