30979 - how to find previously reported bugs

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Documentation Graveyard :: Help Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[Sean Richardson]

A useable but imperfect "beginner's guide to searching for previously
reported bugs" has been added to the QA docs at
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html

Eli Goldberg has said that it is a bit below the standards of other QA 
documents, and he's right. It is too full of empty phrases. This is a 
document meant to be read by people who don't know that they want to read 
it when they start, so it can't be too terse and imperative, but I overdid 
it trying to keep away from that, and didn't set the tone I was aiming for. 

Suggestions for improving the prose or focus would be appreciated.

Please keep in mind that this is a document for beginners who are not familiar
with searching bugzilla, and it is meant to describe enough for them to feel
comfortable doing worthwhile searches, not to impart expertise. 

Not much more should probably be added lest new contributors be more
likely to brush it off as not being worth *their* time. Being honest,
there is no way that every new contributor would bother even if they
understood how instinctively. Nevertheless, this guide should be
as engaging, inviting, and concise as possible to maximise its
attractiveness.

Thanks for any suggestions.

A draft of a companion guide meant to help prescreeners and confirmers has been
started: see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30978 
"guide to screening duplicate bugs - rough draft"

Potentially some of the search techniques described there could be rewritten
as an addendum to the beginner's guide, for those who want to learn more but
aren't ready to try evaluating others' bugs.

Comment 1

[Sean Richardson]

A revised version, retitled "how to find previously reported bugs", 
http://www.albedo.net/~sidr/mozilla/docs/finding-duplicate-bugs.draft-06.html ,
is with any luck an improvement on the original. Comments by Eli Goldberg
guided some attention to clear expression, which had unfortunately been
slighted in favour of attention to content previously.

Comment 2

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

Please put these docs in a more prominent place. I'd suggest adding another 
link somewhere on the main bugzilla page. It could be titled "Help finding
 duplicates" or whatever. If that's not possible, add a reference on the 
"most frequent bugs" page.

You won't believe the way I found them after having fun with bugzilla
for several weeks now, and I still don't know what's the ``official'' path
to reach them...

Comment 3

[Eli Goldberg]

I see Gerv has added a link to it on <http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/>, 
which should become a much more prominent resource.

Comment 4

[Sean Richardson]

At long last, here is the completely rewritten and reorganized tutorial for
finding previously reported bugs. It should be a real improvement on the 
original. 

The tutorial is now called "how to find previously reported bugs" and has
a filename of finding-duplicate-bugs.html -- the former is "correct", the 
latter is the vernacular, but neither "how to find duplicate bugs" nor
finding-previously-reported-bugs.html satisfies, so, failing a brainwave,
I think we'll have to live with the mismatch.

Ideally this tutorial would appear at
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/finding-duplicate-bugs.html and, to
be kind to anywone who might have bookmarked
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html
the same file would be copied to the latter URL as well.

Gerv, I'd suggest changing the link text on http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/
from "How to search for duplicates" to "How to find out if a bug has been
previously reported" to distinguish it from the new "How to screen out duplicate 
bug reports" tutorial (bug 30978).

If you can find anything to tweak or polish, please go ahead, but you may as 
well put this update in place immediately -- it's a marked improvement on the
original as it is.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Checked in as beginning-duplicate-finding.html; because mozilla.org doesn't 
allow links to go dead, you need a fairly good reason for changing a filename 
(as, if you change them too often, you then end up with loads of similarly-named 
files, most of which are redirects). The name is close enough ;-) There'll be 
description text on /quality/help/ which makes it clear.

Oh, and I corrected the spelling of Christine's name ;-)

Gerv

Comment 6

[Daniel Wang]

v