On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Havoc Pennington wrote:
Another kind of bias is that people only complain about what they
don't like, very few people ever praise what they do like.
That is if you have 100 people who like it how it is and 10 people who
don't, you'll get 10 complaints and 1 praise, which looks like a 10-1
vote for changing it.
You find out the reality when you change it and suddenly get 100
complaints and 0 praise. ;-)
Anyway, this is why you really have to understand the goals and
rationale for why the software is how it is, otherwise you sort of
just keep changing it back and forth in response to complaints.
I was actually thinking about this last night when I ran across a "praise
bug" in bugzilla. The problem is that there's no real place for praise ;-).
There's bugzilla for logging all the "this sucks" stuff, but there's no
similar constant surveying / tracking of what people like.... Maybe it would
be a good idea to catalog periodically?
later,
chris