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Andre Klapper's Avatar
Posts: 1,665 | Thanked: 1,649 times | Joined on Jun 2008 @ Praha, Czech Republic
#27
(Dropping those parts where I agree anyway, or have nothing to add.)

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
As I doubted whether you'd really appreciate "You've been doing a kickass job, dude!" as feedback, I've been thinking about this one for the past few days.
Yeah, I've been waiting for your feedback on this topic I have to admit.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
Nokia uses you communicate all of their terrible decisions to the masses, the community makes you advocate for all of their unpopular positions to Nokia, and you end up dealing with a lot of unpleasantness on both sides for things you're not responsible for.
I consider it part of my job to deal with this, however I can really always leave publishing such decisions to Quim if I wanted.
I sometimes leave it to Quim when it comes to complicated non-technical management decisions why Nokia does not want to fix/support something (and I don't know whether it's good or not if I make them public), or when the internal reason for a WONTFIX is so ridiculous that it would make Nokia look really bad in public. (I at least have one such case in mind where I'd love to yell at some people for a ******ed software architecture in a specific Maemo area. Don't ask for details).

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
As bad as that all is, it doesn't include the hours a day toiling through boring-as-all-get-out, and often useless, bug reports from reporters who are frequently just looking for a support channel or a place to vent their overactive spleens
The number of people looking for support in Bugzilla (instead of filing "real" software bugs) is really acceptable in my opinion.
Also I can always answer "Please go to the forum at talk.maemo.org for your configuration issue which does not look like a software bug".
People should avoid but of course should not be afraid to accidentially ask in the wrong place and get redirected.

Fixing https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8132 once 3.4 is in place should help a bit.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
nor playing the only communication link between the internal and external Bugzillas, copying information both ways—by hand—to make sure the duplicated trackers are in sync to support Nokia's outdated and inefficient tracking policies.
I'm currently wondering how aggressive I can/should be when it comes to the stupid "copy & paste" part of my job and when it would become counter-productive.

So far when appropriate I internally write "For future reference please directly ask the original reporter in bugs.maemo.org."
I consider changing this to "Is there a reason why you asked here instead of asking directly in bugs.maemo.org?"
I've been considering this and I'm expecting some managers to answer "We've always had our internal bugtracker and it simply is the unique place where things happen" so I'm currently discussing how to "successfully forcing" them to get into direct contact in bugs.maemo.org. Imagine people with an S60 series background that nowadays work on open source, but are not used to the corresponding open source culture with its community and its expectations and involvements.

Things have improved a little bit in the last months (I'm sometimes positively surprised seeing some Nokians commenting in bugs.maemo.org), but way not enough to make me content or to say "Mission accomplished". Way to go.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
First, 3.4 is taking forever. Somebody needs to get Tero to give Karsten more hours if that needs to happen, and somebody needs to kick Karsten's *** into getting this work onto a public CVS and being open about what's happening.
Up to Karsten to answer this.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
Second, I'm worried that you're ending up an enabler for Nokia's closed practices.
I'm also sometimes worried about this.

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles View Post
You're making it too easy for them to keep operating as they are. Notice that Nokia has improved very little in their processes over the past couple years, yet the quality and quantity of incoming reports is higher than ever and they're actually getting a lot of useful information out of them (whether they actually look externally or not, thanks to your efforts ). With recent MeeGo-related developments, though, it's also likely entirely pointless to worry about this, as so much will be changing in the next 6 months—both for the better and the ill (will Harmattan even have an external bug tracker? ). But it's, perhaps, something to ponder on as we move forward.
Nokia's (technical!) processes work well for Nokia.

Nokia might gain advantages by becoming more open (e.g. earlier testing, faster bugfixing, better PR) and Nokia might gain disadvantages by it (for example a public bugtracker that might be noisy and hence waste some time of developers and managers).

I think currently it's still about proofing that the community feedback is (mostly) valuable.
The question is who can decide how to define when this "testing period" is over and how to move on from there, and which concrete and iterative steps can improve the situation ("iterative" as you cannot quickly and completely change a system in a large company that works well for them) and how to proof this (facts & numbers).
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