RT vs Bugzilla

Tue Mar 7 13:21:13 PST 2006

On 3/7/06, cerise at armory.com <cerise at armory.com> wrote:
> Not knowing anything about RT, I'd think that would prove the superiority
> of Bugzilla in getting information vital to troubleshooting.
>
> One really needs that sort of structure to force users to provide useful
> feedback.  While that'll put people off at the same time, some pressure
> from the developers in question might do the trick to keep people in line
> and filing reports via bugzilla.

Ah, personally, I HATE any system that makes "reporting a bug" any
more cumbersome than absolutely needed.  You need to make it as easy
as possible to record that "something is wrong" and then query your
customer for missing data as needed.  All these "customer service"
forms that have ever forced me to supply 5, ten, fifty pieces of
frequently irrelevant data, and then ask me to explain my problem in a
tiny little window . . .

No.  Tools need to accomodate customer needs, and customer needs low
barrier to entry.  My cynical take on requiring the user to answer
twenty questions is that you gain "efficiency" by making it
sufficiently cumbersome for a user to report trouble such that the
user will simply tolerate all but the very biggest problems, meanwhile
cursing the jackasses over in the support organization with their
"talk to our dumb*ss web interface" mentality.

A good compromise is to capture the user inquiry, and then, if there's
a standard questionnaire that needs filling out, have them fill it
out.

Just, ah, my 2c. :)

-danny

--
http://dannyman.toldme.com