So while doing my daily regiment of old bug reports, I noticed that there's a fair amount of confusion with some of the fields in the feedback system.
There's a field called "Report State Change Request" which seems to be particularly bothersome, and I can understand why (even if English is your first language).
Some people read it as: "I am requesting that when my report's state has changed...", whereas others read it like this: "I am requesting that my report's state be changed..." and still others read it like this: "I am reporting that my the state of this has changed, and requesting you..." Isn't English grand?
So what does this field mean to REAL Software? All of the above, to a certain extent. What we want is for you use that field as a way to have a dialog with the person in charge of your report. I think an example situation would make this easier to understand.
You submit a report that X looks goofy on Windows and you think it's a bug.
I review the report and think that it looks correct on Windows, so I mark it as not a bug.
You disagree with me, and so you take a screen shot of what it looks like on your system and find a relevant entry in the Windows Ux guidelines. At this point, you should upload your screen shot, tell me why you disagree with the evaluation (in the description field), and provide the link you found. Then in the Report State Change Request field, you put "Please review the new information added on X."
I notice that there's now a Report State Change Request for the bug, so I look at it, realize my mistake and verify the report -- we were using two different versions of Windows and it wasn't obvious from the original report. Oops! Problem solved. I remove the Report State Change Request.
What you should not be putting into the Report State Change Request is: "Yup", "Please", your email address, "what is this used for?", etc. ;-)
You may be wondering why the report isn't automatically flagged when you update it, and the answer is simple: it is flagged, but in a different way. And that flag is only noticed on open reports, not closed one. The Report State Change Request is basically a dispute mechanism -- you are disputing the evaluation on your report. Adding more information doesn't let us know that you dispute something, it just adds more information (it could be that we've merged two reports, or another person has signed on, etc).
Another good use for the Report State Change Request field is when a bug is no longer a bug -- let us know! Just put down "Fixed in RBXXX" so that we know the issue is resolved for you.
Hopefully this clears things up for you a bit, assuming you were confused in the first place. :-)
Nope. I'm never confused. :)
Wait...what was it I'm confused about?
All this confusion is confusing me.
So that bit is to say, "Look at this report. Something has changed from when it was reviewed. Take another look." right?
"Report State Change Request"-->"Feedback to REAL about this report"?
@Corbin - Isn't that a feature request ?
See how far that gets
That field never confused me... but there's something that confuses me on the Feedback system that you might help to understand. Why there are so many bug reports with the status "Open" that were never verified or reviewed?
Is it a good ideia to use the "Report State Change Request" field for opened reports that were never verified or reviewed and submit something like "Please Verify or Review this bug - it was reported XX months ago" to bring it to the attention of someone? If not, what's the best way to get **at least** a report verified or reviewed that was submitted several months ago? I have some on my list that still have the status "Open" and the bugs were never verified (at least the report status didn't change).
@Carlos -- Open and Reviewed are essentially the same thing. The main difference being that with Reviewed, someone took the time to edit the report and hit submit, whereas open, it was simply read. Sometimes, reviewed also means the report was assigned to someone for further looking-into, but not often. But every single report that gets submitted is read by multiple people. For instance, within 5 minutes of a report being submitted, it lands in my inbox and I read over it. And I know that's the case for others as well, and that's not even counting the testing department.
If your report hasn't been marked as at least reviewed for a long time (we're talking six months or more) and it's a bug report, then sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. However, it'd be best if you could re-test that bug in the latest version just to make sure it's still a bug before you do that. There are a number of times when a bug is fixed as a side-effect of another bug (or a direct fix, but the report was a duplicate). I know that when I was looking at my list a few weeks ago, I closed at least a dozen reports because they were already fixed and I just didn't know it.
@jdiwnab -- yup, that's what the field means. It just gets confusing when English isn't your first language (and sometimes when it is!) because report is a noun and a verb.
You know, you could just change the bug report form to use a less ambiguous wording ...