On Friday 16 Jan 2009, Rob OpenSuSE wrote:
If you spend some time, trying to field Installation questions, from new users, it becomes obvious that error notifications deemed in Bugzilla "cosmetic" erode confidence. Large numbers of known bugs in heavily used systems, are then hit over and over. The Internal developments are often let down by useability nits, sometimes just labelling of buttons, or font sizes, which the open process ought to benefit from early feedback, without expensive "focus group" testing.
We're talking customer satisfaction and perception here. From my own experience of managing a help desk, allowing the affected people to set priority from their perspective separately from "fix priority" allows much of this to be captured, and assigning a proportion of the support budget to what (from a developer's perspective) are cosmetic problems or other annoyances is a successful way of raising satisfaction in the product.
David