-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 [sent later] On 2010-06-28 18:55, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Sun, 27 Jun 2010 14:20:30 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
Jim Henderson wrote:
The idea of using proxies to report bugs isn't unprecedented. For many years (well over a decade in total), I volunteered to do just that thing in the various incarnations of the Novell forums. The structure worked a little differently, especially in the early days, because there wasn't a public bug reporting tool, but the forum staff escalated issues to designated backline engineers, who then could take the information to development.
In my world, this is simply called "lst line support". It is staffed by people with a certain minimum of technical skill, capable of identifying the most common problems and pointing the user to a PTF or otherwise help him.
Makes sense to me - though in the online world, I find that as front line support goes, there tends to be very strong technical expertise when you operate as a meritocracy. Those who give good help continue to do so, and tend to acquire a lot of knowledge and be able to solve a lot of problems.
In the "real world" this does not often happen, because those in that 1st line are under-payed and unmotivated, in my experience, so that they seek a different post, or even better, a different company, going away as soon as they can with their experience - lost. In my circle of friends we call them "flower pots", because attempting to solve a problem talking to them is like talking to pottery. Very nice pottery when it is not phone, but human. Usually young girls hired for events. Thus the term: flower pots. Not trying to demean them, I have been a flower pot myself, of the rough kind ;-)
I've seen it play out time and time again very successfully; I think this model (or an adaptation of it) could be successful here and let those who do development concentrate more on development.
The model works fine, no doubt about it - but would it also work in a project based on volunteer efforts?
I think it could; the developers have the same constraints whether they're paid to develop or not, and the technical people answering the questions (in my experience) have been volunteers. I used to be one myself in the Novell forums years ago.
The primary difference with an open project is that of accessibility to the "back line" and to the developers. But the mechanism of filtering those escalations is something that I see as equally valid regardless (not talking about 'proxy bug reports' here, just the filtering of the "I can't print" type posts from backline/development level assistance unless there's an actual problem that needs to be fixed).
And it would make for faster solving. It is discouraging to find that the first answer on a bugzilla that took many hours to investigate and report is not written till several months later. Perhaps better "triaging" (is that the word?) would help. - -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 11.2 x86_64 "Emerald" GM (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iF4EAREIAAYFAkwpr9QACgkQja8UbcUWM1y5MgD+If3TbYKd/tDHOTGwkKC8TQhF 9aSLV9eBjG5ucS5SxrYBAJlSSGmeBfS9wUxwEBCTFXIHCPZSyxFUMyC3Oo8jXTbm =tIn4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org