Enable default product-level bug templates for Firefox-related products
Categories
(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: Bug Creation/Editing, enhancement)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: emceeaich, Unassigned)
References
Details
Attachments
(1 obsolete file)
Thanks to the work in bug 1510109 we can now specify a bug description template at the product level.
Should we introduce these for all Firefox related projects?
A straw version would be:
Thank you for helping make Firefox better. If you are reporting a defect, please complete the following:
What were you doing?
Please tell us what site you were on, and what steps led to the error you are reporting
What happened?
What, if any, error messages did you see? Did the browser crash? Screenshots or screen recordings can be attached to this report and are helpful in isolating and replicating the bug.
What should had happened?
Was was the expected result? "Not crashing" may be a valid answer.
Anything else we should know?
Do you have antivirus or other security software installed? Do you have extensions installed? You can also go to about:support in another window or tab and attach the report to this bug report.
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Reporter | |
Comment 1•6 years ago
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Asking some engineering managers for feedback on this.
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Comment 2•6 years ago
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We already have something like this for the guided bug flow (which I believe all new BMO non-employee users get) so I don't think we need this for the non-guided flow. Users who are the non-guided flow are often filing things which aren't "bugs" (e.g. tasks or enhancements) and are regular employees who know what makes good bug reports. If too many people are getting the non-guided flow then IMO we should fix that and improve it.
Taking a step back… what are we trying to solve?
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Comment 3•6 years ago
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I was thinking about the same. New contributors should be welcomed by the guided bug form aka Bugzilla Helper, while frequent contributors may not need such a template. My current priority is low, but I think it requires an overhaul as part of an improved BMO onboarding experience.
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Comment 4•6 years ago
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I disagree about the guided bug form as well as the custom bug forms which I think have imposed a development tax on us because we have to keep that in sync with changes we make to the mainline bug forms.
I'd rather have one bug filing experience, and GitHub's demonstrated that with templates, you can get good bugs.
To accommodate :MattN's observation, we could leave the template out if the user is in editbugs, or clear it if a user marks a bug as a task or enhancement.
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Comment 5•6 years ago
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Yeah, removing the guided bug form is also a valid option. I don’t say we should keep it. We already have several ways to file a bug, so I would rather like to merge them if we can:
- Regular form without advanced fields
- Regular form with advanced fields
- Guided form
- Custom forms
- new-bug form
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Comment 6•6 years ago
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+1 to merging but also +1 to not forcing a guided flow (or similar) on editbugs users if possible.
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Comment 7•6 years ago
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A template sounds like a good idea to me for defects (not tasks or features). Presumably <Ctrl-A, Delete> will clear the input field when the template gets in the way. I didn't even know about most of the aforementioned forms and I don't know how to find them again.
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Comment 8•6 years ago
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We have many DevTools bugs that do not contain these data, and I spend time coming back to the person and asking them for specifics. They might not even know that we need that to reproduce, because they are new to bug filing. So asking these questions might help them and us to focus the bug report towards the right areas. As Panos says, people can always quickly delete stuff that we've prefilled in the textarea.
I've often found the guided forms getting in my way when I've been presented with them (e.g. when different products from Firefox display them by default, even to editbugs users), I feel like they don't let me specify as much data as I'd like to, because the custom interface hides fields in order to 'simplify'. And then I need to do further edits once the bug is actually filed.
A prefilled text template looks like a better solution to me (a "best of both worlds" :-))
Also: as a data point and maybe this is something Emma want to discuss with me---last year I was working on an experimental web extension to add a button to Bugzilla that would help engineers file "good first bugs". With the click of a button it would prefill the textarea with a... template! and the engineer would need to respond to questions such as which files to edit, what to do in them, etc. The bug could not be filed until the TEMPLATE sections were replaced with actual content.
Unfortunately the multiple versions of Bugzilla themes make it challenging to develop this type of extension as the input fields are not always named the same, and I haven't continued this development for a bit, but I wonder if this is something that could be considered since we're thinking about templates in BZ.
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Comment 9•6 years ago
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Having multiple templates would alleviate some of the problems mentioned above, and GitHub supports that. I think that should be a separate bug for that work.
:sole, let's try the template idea out for DevTools and expand from there. The Data Science team is already using one for experiments. I'm asking :jmok for her feedback on this so far.
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Comment 10•6 years ago
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The template we have for the Data Science bug has been tremendously helpful in getting the information that we need. Having the ability to edit that template so that it fits our teams specific needs has also been very helpful. With just a blank field we were not getting enough information if any at all. Some tickets were only filled out with a title.
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Comment 11•6 years ago
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:sole, I'll follow up on your question in a separate bug.
For now I'm going to put the template mentioned above as the default for DevTools, and and look at how that works out.
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Updated•6 years ago
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Comment 12•6 years ago
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Comment 13•6 years ago
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(In reply to Kohei Yoshino [:kohei] (Bugzilla UX) (FxSiteCompat) from comment #12)
See also: https://github.blog/2018-05-02-issue-template-improvements/
Perhaps switching the template depending on the bug type?
It'd also be nice to have additional template types.
But this is another bug.
:sole, you've had the issue templates in DevTools for awhile now. Is that helping with bug quality?
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Comment 14•6 years ago
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From what I have seen and what people have told me, these templates are helping people provide information we need. I haven't seen any negatives. Quoting: "I had a couple of bugs which seemed to have information from the template, and as a result were more actionable".
So all positive feedback so far. Thank you!
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Updated•6 years ago
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Updated•1 year ago
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