Bug triaging (Was: Nebraska Team Plans Fiesty Fest!)

[Dean Sas]

nik butler wrote:
>> Not really, as you say, you dupe or you comment. Personally I always
>> subscribe to the bug too, lots of people subscribed to the bug may
>> make it stand out to developers. The problem with 'me too' comments
>> are that they are unnecessary after a while and just results in lots
>> of pointless emails being sent out, slowing people down further.
> The thing about the community though is that there are hidden accepted
> behaviors, established only after observing, so there are many many many
> more potential valuable contributions we can miss because its not
> obvious how to become  involved. It wouldn't occur to me that
> subscribing to a bug would make it stand out more to a developer.

It's not a hard and fast rule, but if there's a huge list of subscribers 
  when someone looks at a bug, it stands to reason it is relatively 
important.

> Pretty
> much every user who experiences a bug may have a particular time
> constraint to their reporting of it so possibly being able to see and
> agree with a previous report may help them commit to reporting it. I
> certainly wouldn't expect to generate extra noise on emails through
> peolpe adding comment. 

It's probably unfair to characterise it as noise, but sometimes it is 
unnecessary and I've seen "me toos" annoy a developer who's acknowledged 
the bug already. Every comment sends an email because the comment is 
possibly useful to the interested people, possibly not useful to the 
poor user who reported an often encountered ubiquity bug.

Tes the 'me toos ' are not ideal and when I see a
> bug that has been reported , for instance today when Synergy was not
> working well, I want to know how often and how consistent this bug is
> experienced but more important to me the user is that I know someone who
> can and is able to fix it will be looking at fixing it.[1]
> 

I'm not sure what we can do to make this information available if it's 
present. Usually the clues are an upstreamed or an assigned bug. That's 
not say they're being actively worked upon though.

Dean