Tuesday 29 July 2008

Bug reports are broken

I've just had the pleasure of receiving a response from the project manager of Subclipse, Mark Phippard, regards my off-the-cuff bitching about an installation issue with the product. This follows my previous bitching about a breakage using Technorati, that was responded to and fixed by a community manager.

This makes me wonder if these responses are because bugs can be closed while blogs are forever. Is publicly griping about a product a better way to get a response than privately going through the intended support channels?

Is blogging going to become the best channel for moaning about stuff? (Is it already?)

2 comments:

VRBones said...

I've been wondering where the best place to put some of the UnAngband bugs I've found. Are you saying you'd like them here ?

* Double-handed specialisation continually states "you know your [offhand weapon] better"

* Running down corridors doesn't work with columns

* Picking up objects that go into a supply bag states that "you picked up a supply bag"


From my experience as a developer and aftermarket support I would LOVE a simple repository for each application that my users would write bugs to. Makes it much easier to control the scope of issues. In the real world they would rather phone / email / chat to others than use such a system as maintainability isn't their issue.

Maybe what you're experiencing is that searching and extracting meaningful data means that areas of concern can be addressed regardless of its location on the internet. A win for the client, another thing to do for the developer.

Andrew Doull said...

I believe you'd be referring to http://developer.berlios.de/bugs/?group_id=331 then...