Tony ([info]quikchange) wrote,
@ 2008-03-24 09:14:00
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Current location:Toronto, ON
Current mood: creative
Entry tags:geeky

Bugzilla needs a talk page
The current incarnation of Bugzilla uses a single page to display both the current state of a bug report as well as the discovery and discussion history that lead to it. For nontrivial bugs that have been around for a while this usually means that somebody who hasn't been following them since the beginning needs to read the entire discussion before grokking the current state. Although some of the current state may be captured in structured form using the fields that appear at the top of the page, that is usually insufficient information to properly understand the nature of the bug.

There is a solution to this problem that has been successfully applied to the domain of wikis: the talk page. This is a means of divorcing the state from the history so that it is easy to glean the currently known information about an issue while still having an avenue to continue investigation/discussion and preserving the history of this discourse. Applying such an approach to an issue tracking system like Bugzilla would eliminate the clutter on bug reports without requiring us to forgo the benefits of revising issue details as new facts come to light and opinions change.


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[info]punk_apple
2008-03-24 06:01 pm UTC (link)
That would work :) actually funny, I was running to a lot of old WS bugs where you had made some comments... and where it would be helpful to see something more than dupe, defer, closed .. like what is the status really?

Bugzilla works for small projects. When somehting gets big enough, the bug tracking systems should grow too. Don't get me started on that, just walk to Tristan and he'll tell what I think :) radar is sweet and I wish we had something like that...

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[info]quikchange
2008-03-24 06:22 pm UTC (link)
How do you know Tristan?

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[info]punk_apple
2008-03-24 07:36 pm UTC (link)
I've known someone that likes him since that someone was 13. So I've seen (well rather read) when there was this guy writing Mac sw for Yahoo, then how he got to Apple... and then when I saw in some note (or was it at Janey's facebook friends list or something) that he had switched to VMware I was entertained and had to send him a chat :) There aren't that many people who switch from a fruit company to the virtual world...
Small world eh?

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[info]stak
2008-03-25 05:25 am UTC (link)
"Applying such an approach to an issue tracking system like Bugzilla would eliminate the clutter that graces bug reports that have evolved through extensive exploratory discussion without requiring us to forgo the benefits of being bale to revise the details of the bug report as new facts come to light and opinions change."

This seems to be one of those sentences where by the time I get to the end, I've forgotten the beginning :p

But it's a good idea :) I've had to look at various Firefox bugs lately and the amount of discussion on some of them is pretty ridiculous.

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