[libreoffice-users] Re: Engaging users: initial results of the survey

Hi, Michael,

On 11/12/13 3:53 AM, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi Ken,
>
> On Mon, 2013-11-11 at 11:33 -0700, Ken Springer wrote:
> > After using LO for awhile, I found and filed a couple of bugs/issues.  I
> > wanted to contribute in the area of reporting issues, but I don't have
> > the knowledge to fix them.  I didn't expect those problems to go to the
> > head of the line.  But I *did* expect them to be put in the queue and
> > eventually fixed.
>
>         The problem of course is that there is no queue of bugs-to-fix. We try
> to prioritize issues, so that we can see those that are seriously
> debilitating and then try to fix those on a best-effort basis.

Maybe there should be a queue, and fixed on a FIFO basis.  Are either of 
my posted bugs, or the ones that I listed in another post debilitating? 
 No.  Would I expect mine to be fixed before X number of debilitating 
bugs?  Not in a million years.  But they need to be fixed eventually, 
and not languish until the end of time.    LOL

More than once, it's mentioned that open source projects have limited 
resources.  That I don't mind, either.  But, if you can't/won't/don't 
get all of the bugs squashed with the resources you have, then you need 
to step back and reassess the situation.  You need to do 1 of 2 things:

        1.  Acquire more resources
	2.  Acknowledge the project has outgrown the existing resources, and 
it's time
                to top adding features you do not have the resources to maintain.

As I said earlier, it's better to do a few things well, than a lot of 
things poorly.  I seriously doubt there are thousands of people with the 
same issues (bugs) I have.  But there must be a lot of people like me 
for whom a feature they need doesn't work.  Individually, there won't be 
many users per bug.  But in the aggregate, you could have thousands and 
thousands of unhappy users.  Do you feel those folks are going to give 
LO a good push with out adding the proverbial "but"?

> > What I didn't like was being told my issues were not important.  BS!
> > It's important to me.
>
>         This is the interesting piece to me. Can you expand on your experience
> there ? clearly all bugs are important to someone - but not all are
> 'Critical' or whatever from a prioritization perspective. Nevertheless,
> perhaps the naming of those prioritization is needlessly offensive.
> Potentially with our new bugzilla we could use P1 -> P6 or whatever -
> making it clear that this is a spectrum.

This is were the word "critical" is the issue, and how it's defined. 
Sometimes, you can give the word a fixed, quantitative "value", if you 
will in some cases, in others, it's subjective.  An issue may be minor 
and not critical from your perspective, but it could be major and very 
critical to your user.

What told me I was being ignored, and essentially my issues were not 
critical, is the fact they were never assigned to anyone for fixing, and 
labeled as such.

> > Let's say you have a car, and every 4th time you go to use it, it won't
> > start.  You take it to your mechanic, and each time you do, he tells you
> > "it's not important, he's got bigger problems to solve".  Are you going
> > to continue to take it to that mechanic, or are you going to find a
> > different mechanic?
>
>         I'm really not sure that there are any mechanics out there that do work
> for free; I've not met one. Of course - if you want to pay for a bug to
> be fixed, our level-3 bug queue has only a handful of open-bugs, and
> they turn over on a weekly basis. But I strongly suspect you don't want
> to pay.

Don't want to pay?  I bought a commercial writing program to help 
replace LO.  Isn't that paying?   <G>

>         So - perhaps a more apt analogy is taking your car to a local friendly
> volunteer / free mechanic down the road who helps people out of the
> goodness of their heart - and berating them for not spending a week
> investigating and fixing the squeak in your suspension -now- because
> he's been working trying to get other people's car's to start at all ;-)

With the car analogy, it depends on how "critical" having the car 
working is to you.  If you need to have it start every time, barring 
being out of gas and such (LOL), you pay to get it fixed.  If the use is 
sporadic, and dependability of that car isn't needed, you might choose 
to have your neighbor tinker with it.  Even then, there's an end to that 
path, you get your car back, and do something different.  Sell it, give 
it away, let it rust away in your driveway.

Either way, the car eventually gets used less and less.

>         Anyhow - there is no desire to offend people through the prioritization
> flow; that is a really critically useful function of QA though - so
> ideas on how we can improve that appreciated.

I downloaded another open source writing program, and the developers are 
clear they do what they want, if you want an issue fixed, you fix it 
yourself, one way or another.  That's fine, if there's issues I need and 
they don't work, that's fine.  They aren't telling me to use their 
program instead of XXXXXX.  They say here it is, if it works fine, if it 
doesn't, please use something else.

The minute LO or any open source program says "Use us instead of XXXXXXX 
or YYYYYYYY", you just crossed a line where users will expect things to 
work.  After all, you just told them you can use LO instead of XXXXXX or 
YYYYYYY.  But in XXXXXXXX or YYYYYYY, the feature(s) the user is looking 
for works and in LO it is broken, and the user does not have the ability 
to fix it, what do you think the user is going to do?




--
Ken

Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 24.0
Thunderbird 17.0.8
LibreOffice 4.1.2.3


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