Closed Bug 370278 Opened 17 years ago Closed 17 years ago

Making Bugzilla more QA Worker Friendly

Categories

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 68357

People

(Reporter: web, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061221 Fedora/1.5.0.9-1.fc5 Firefox/1.5.0.9
Build Identifier: 

Probably one of the strangest bug reports I've ever written...

Making Bugzilla more QA Worker Friendly

1. Make an interface where a QA worker just clicks a button to get a new bug to   get a randomly picked recent, unverified bug to both verify and compare to other reports for duplication.  This would be similar to the Project Gutenberg Editing project where you are just randomly assigned a page or two to edit.  That way, editors don't have to choose a book and go through the daunting task of doing it all by themselves.  Also, the volunteer work is highly modularized so you can easily give a few minutes a week or hours a day - it's the volunteers choice.  See the Project Gutenberg editor volunteer site at http://www.pgdp.net/c/ for background/inspiration.  Bug reporting, validating, and comparing really needs to go web 2.0 you know. 

2. BUT with Gutenburg, each page is like any other page, whereas with bugs, some are heinous and some are easy to reproduce...  I've thought about these issues too.  I envision that a QA volunteer would click a "give me a bug" button and then could decide to work on it or pass.  If pass is chosen, you should be forced to say that it was too complicated, too easy/trivial, etc..  This way, possibly a recommender system could filter just the appropriate bugs to you.  A QA volunteer may also just want to choose a trivial report instead of playing solitaire to waste time.

3. This sounds good and all, but I can't trust someone who doesn't program to direct which bugs go to me...  True, but the the brain power of a few people is much greater than one person and almost equivalent to you smarty-pants programmers.  Therefore, until X number of QA volunteers have verified the bug would it even go to the programmers (maybe programmers can have a button too?). X would be chosen by the project implementing bugzilla.  If the QA person said that the bug was resolved as duplicate or worksforme but the user does not agree, the user could then choose to resubmit their bug into the QA pool of bugs X number of times.  However, if the user agrees (user error perhaps).  The bug should get removed from the pool by staying a duplicate or worksforme.

3.  Would people actually want to do this work?  It sounds so boring that's why I never do it...  Yes they would!  People like strange things, like writing code for one.  The give me a bug button removes all the inertia it takes to start QA work and pick a bug.  I think more people would do QA work if you could actually be a super-worker in this area.  For example, developers can see how many bugs they've fixed or how many lines of code they wrote.  It would be cool if a QA worker could somehow see how many duplicate bugs they've helped eliminate and get some sort of ranking for it (master-exterminator ranking perhaps?).  Entire QA communities may spring up and argue with each other just like all other Web 2.0 communities.  Wonderful!  Programmers can stay away and just wait until a bug gets into the verified bug pool.

Concluding remarks:
With a system like this, QA people can finally get treated like developers.  Just think of one day going to your favorite open-source project page and seeing this:

Volunteer to help develop software without even knowing how to program!  Do it for the gold star ranking, do it because you love to help out and it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, do it because you love open source, do it because you hate that other software.  We don't care what your reasons are.  Just help!

By the way, users who report real bugs that verify easily should also get some sort of Queen-Bee-who-makes-lots-of-good-bugs ranking too.  This way, they can form their own communities and argue about who finds the best bugs.  Let me know if you want this in a separate report.

Also, I could help with mock-ups to help develop the look-and-feel of user interface.  I'd also be willing to sit in on an IRC meeting.

Reproducible: Always
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
Yes, I have two #3... 
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