ALERT Project concludes successfully

[Posted September 3, 2013 by ris]

KDE News presents a report on the successful conclusion of the ALERT Project. The project aimed to help open source developers to work more effectively and to produce better software by improving bug tracking, resolution and software quality tools. "KDE's involvement in the early stages was mostly in the form of contributing to documents describing the problems that should be solved. For example, Bugzilla is a popular tool to track bugs, but for large projects such as KDE there are problems with duplicate reports and with reports being filed to the wrong team (it is not always easy for a user to understand that an apparent problem with a web browser failing to show pages is actually due to a separate software handling wireless connections). With this in mind, the KDE experts decided to focus on Solid (the KDE software components dealing with hardware interaction) as a base for KDE's testing of the ALERT software."

ALERT Project concludes successfully

Posted Sep 3, 2013 20:10 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm having trouble distilling much useful information out of that atrocious website.

Am I right in interpreting that this project's output is the design of an integrated communication system for linking mailing lists, bug reports, forums, etc.? Or is there something else as the primary result.

Personally, my experience has never been that there are too many forms of communication but rather that all of them suck hard. Users in general _are not_ going to go hunting for a bug report link, go through 2-3 pages of sign-up, wait for an email to arrive to validate the account, and then finally go through the multitude of steps to report a bug that will likely just get rejected because they didn't fill it out like a trained QA analyst.

Preferring an in-app Report Bug button, making no sign-up/sign-in required (or at least let people just login with on click via Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc), and having an actual QA triage team to improve and weed out the submissions is key. The tools have never been the huge problem; the lazy-developer-focused process and resulting high burden on users (the FOSS norm, sadly) has been the problem, at least from what I've seen in my years.

ALERT Project concludes successfully

Posted Sep 3, 2013 20:47 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

s/the FOSS norm, sadly/the norm, sadly/

TIFIFY.

Seriously, closed-source and in-house development is in general just as lazy and dev-oriented instead of user-oriented as FOSS development. Sometimes, even more.

ALERT Project concludes successfully

Posted Sep 4, 2013 7:00 UTC (Wed) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (1 responses)

> people just login with on click via Facebook/Google/Twitter/etc

Ah ! No, sorry, I can't do that.
But I agree with the remaining of your post.

ALERT Project concludes successfully

Posted Sep 6, 2013 17:08 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

You cna have them as an option with a traditional login form (or OpenID so yuo can use whatever service you want, including your own) in addition to these. Just make it as easy as humanly possible to get through whichever hoops you feel are necessary; I opt out of requiring login at all and just use Akismet and some other tricks to filter out spam. I very rarely see a report that requires me to contact the reporter; they're either "good enough" to fill in the blanks on our own or they're unsalvageably awful and just dismissed.

... Anyone have an answer to my actual question I originally posted?

ALERT Project concludes successfully

Posted Sep 4, 2013 16:30 UTC (Wed) by morksigens (guest, #92681) [Link]

I know your pain with bug reporting... I wish more FOSS management sites would use Mozilla's Persona (BrowserID) for easy log-in. Signing up for every bugtracker out there is like manual memory management. And I dislike manual memory management. Especially if you can't free the stuff you allocate.