Re: Self-assessment of the quality of the maintenance work
On Mon, 22 Dec 2008, Mark Brown wrote:
> things. My concern with sending out the e-mails to all and sundry is
> that it's taking things too far in the initial stages of the process and
> that adding that further down the line when the system is established
> would be a better approach.
Ok. Looks like a fairly reasonable request.
>
> > > information reported is only going to be as good as the people filling
> > > it in make it and there's little motiviation to make much effort with
> > > the data.
>
> > Can you expand ?
>
> The data being entered on the form has pretty much no utility for the
> person filling in the form which means that a lot of people are just
> going to fill it in as quickly as possible.
Ok, I understand this point but note that your remark applies equally to
the creation of the Description: field in debian/control. Yet we have
people who care about good description fields. It's a matter of
understanding why it's important to do the work (like you suggest later in
your mail).
> This will degrade the
> quality of information produced, particularly when people are
> resubmitting the second time around (since repetitiveness reduces the
> amount of thought required). If people don't feel that there's some
> importance beyond the act of filling in the form then there's a real
> possibility that many of them are only going to care about the fact the
> form has been submitted, not what was on it. More targetted, human
> generated, requests tend not to have this problem so much since the
> human part of it provides a cue that the data will be used.
Yes, that's true. That's why every time that the user has to submit
it again, the form must be presented in a way so that it highlights the
cases where the expectations (as defined by his own self-assessment) are
not met in practice. Ideally those differences should even be reported in
the mail itself (it would help reduce the impression of a useless
automatic mail).
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
Reply to: