On Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:46:54 +0000 (UTC) Jim Henderson <hendersj@gmail.com> wrote:
One hour is probably the longest time we can count on with motivated users. (School hour is 45 minutes for a reason.)
I don't disagree, but what I'm saying is that there will undoubtably be some tasks that require more time, so rather than guarantee that the task will take < 60 minutes regardless of skill level or knowledge, we need to be realistic about what can be achieved in that time.
Jim, this is not about task, it is about user, reporter. We will not look task and estimate how many hours user has to spend on it, but the other way around. Take one hour limit and find tasks that fit in that time frame. In professional world you have task and look how many man hours you need for it. As you know, working with people that donate their free time is different. They will give just as much as they want, or have. Any demand above that individual limit is pointless. What is goal of small tasks limited to 1 hour or lesser? It is the same goal that makes Wikipedia successful. Give a chance people with little time for openSUSE to contribute. That is majority of our users.
If we try to make some sort of guarantee and it turns out that most people take more than an hour, then nobody's going to trust the estimates.
Thus, it's not a matter of simply guessing, but rather doing an actual estimate, using best case/worst case/likely case weighted averages - and that could end up taking more time to come up with for some tasks than the actual task itself would take.
Estimate is just that. We can tell that user that knows this and that will spend 1 hour or lesser. To learn "this and that" user will need additional hours, and to be honest we can estimate that too trough average reading speed vs. size of text, available help, etc.
... users skills can be taken out only with helper script that will offer interface with plain language and as output give file that is ready to upload, or even upload it, as smolt client does with hardware information.
There again, though, the time to create/debug the helper scripts (which I don't know how generic they can be) might take longer than having someone knowledgeable actually doing the task.
We are talking about scripts that will collect info. I mentioned somewhere that we on IRC spend more time explaining how to get information needed to solve a problem, then solving the problem. Any script that will cut down on that is not wasted time. Also, knowledgeable people are busy :)
That said - scripting tests to get more data points would be useful. For example, if there was a video driver bug that could be reproduced using a script, getting people with a variety of hardware supported by the driver in question would definitely be useful.
That too.
Jim
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