Fogbugz Feature Request

I was going to post this over on the fogbugz support forum, but halfway through I realized it might not be a great feature request and could probably use some debate, so I thought I would post it up here instead.... cause this is where I post my crazy half thought out ideas. Feel free to skip if you're not interested in software development or bug tracking systems.


Here is something I've noticed about software development in general that I would like to address. Hopefully Fogbugz can help.

First some background:

Typically when new bugs are entered into a bug tracking system, a priority is assigned. The priority is typically based on the "severity" of the bug, for example, a bug that causes data loss would be categorized as a 1. A bug that stops the user from accessing a part of the application but has a simple work around might be a 2. etc... etc...

Typically the prioritization of a bug takes into account the characteristics of the bug itself. What has happened in our fogbugz system is that all the open bugz are in one list, "undecided". Some of these are of high priority, we fix all of those issues before each release. There are many other bugs below the top that we don't always have time to fix. Prioritizing within those cases can be difficult. If we increase the granularity of the severities, then it becomes more difficult to enter bugs, if we use a more course listing of severities, then we loss some of the subtelies of prioritization.

Now onto the meat:

Most development shops would say that the source of a bug report matters. A bug coming from your biggest customer usually carries more weight than the bug entered by a small shop.

Here's what's interesting, in most organizations, bugs entered by internal QA get more attention than bugs entered by your customers. This makes sense during the early stages of development, when a customer hasn't seen the new features (fix bugs as close to their introduction as possible) but makes less sense as the product matures. During the beta period, bugs encountered by the customers should typically be given higher priority than the ones entered internally, as they are more likely to reflect issues that the customer base at large will experience.

The feature request basically boils down to an ability to keep track of the source of a fogbugz case. Before migrating to fogbugz we used a home grown bug tracking system that allowed us to associate a particular customer with a case. This way, when the bug was resovled, the original customer could be notified. This might require too much of fogbugz (it would need to interface with, or support buiding a customer list) but I'll admit that is probably the one feature I miss most since upgrading to fogbugz.

Spitzer shakes finger at Sony

Spitzer shakes finger at Sony: "Despite the fact that the XCP rootkit has been in the headlines of late, it's important to note that Sony uses other forms of DRM as well, some almost as nasty. SunComm's MediaMax software also comes as a free bonus on selected Sony discs, and because SunComm knows how much you want their DRM on your computer, they've gone ahead and given you an early Christmas present: MediaMax installs itself on your PC even if you decline the license agreement."

So yeah, I guess that means I should never buy a Sony CD again. Not that I have recently anyway, but now I have to be intentional about it.

Joel on iTunes

Joel on Software: "Econ 101 says that they should raise the price on these ultra-popular movies. As long as the movie is sold out, why not jack up the price and make more money?"

I thought of another reason that the record industries argument doesn't make sense. With movie theatres, there are a limited number of seats. To maximize profit for a particular movie, you will want to get the theatre as full as possible with people willing to pay as high a price as possible.

Unfortunately the iTunes music store doesn't work that way, neither does any of the web actually. So long as Apple is able to cover their bandwidth bills, there is no addition cost if one song sells more than another. Say 100 people buy song A, and 10 people buy song B. Obviously we should charge more for song A right, because only 100 people can buy..... wait a minute, that's not true. There aren't 100 copies of song A, there is the potential for unlimited copies of song A. There is no such thing as scarcity.

This cuts back to the core of the argument I've been making on this blog. The old model seemed to work because the intellectual property tax was tied to something physical. So nobody needed to know about the difference. But when you are talking about something that is almost infinitely cheap to distribute, all of a sudden people intuitively understand that copying a CD from a friend doesn't decrease the amount of music available in the world. They intuitively know that the physical model doesn't quite work anymore. The problem is, we don't have something to replace it....

Congress gives Fair Use legislation a hearing

Congress gives Fair Use legislation a hearing: "In the meantime, the MPAA and RIAA want to nudge consumers towards their ideal marketplace: where we have to pay for the privilege of viewing or listening to content more than once. Consumers have let the industry know through decreased CD, DVD, and movie ticket sales that they are not finding the industry's value proposition very compelling. But instead of responding to market forces, the movie and music industries are continuing their attempts to legislate the market. If your elected representatives are not willing to support your Fair Use rights, don't support them next election."

hmmm, more arstechnica on DRM.

Sony sued over DRM "rootkit"

Sony sued over DRM "rootkit": "This entire fiasco could be one of the best things to happen on the consumer's technology rights front in recent years. A few well placed law-suits may raised consumer awareness to the oncoming onslaught of unfriendly technological measures supposedly aimed at curbing piracy, and may even prompt a re-evaluation of tactics similar to those used by Sony."

Sony: what you don't know can't hurt you

Sony: what you don't know can't hurt you: "Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG's global digital business division, showed up on NPR to try and sweep the entire thing under the rug.

'Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it,' he asked? 'The software is designed to protect our CDs from unauthorized copying, ripping.'"

Most people don't know what mesothelioma is either. Doesn't mean they want to get it.

Telegraph | News | Bush will veto anti-torture law after Senate revolt

Telegraph | News | Bush will veto anti-torture law after Senate revolt: "The Bush administration pledged yesterday to veto legislation banning the torture of prisoners by US troops after an overwhelming and almost unprecedented revolt by loyalist congressmen."

hmmm. I thought torture = bad.

Kansas education board rewrites science

Via Kevin Schofield
Kansas education board downplays evolution - Science - MSNBC.com: "In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena."

Who knew the Kansas Board of Education had the power to do that....

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google Desktop is Back with a Vengeance

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Google Desktop is Back with a Vengeance: "The highlighted requests are requests to URLs of Atom & RSS feeds that were in my browser cache by Google Desktop. I did not configure the application to fetch these feeds. So not only does Google Desktop flood websites with feed requests in a manner bordering on the behavior of a malicious application, it also does this automatically without the end user explicitly subscribing to the feed."

Dare Obasanjo (who knows a thing or two about how to build rss aggregators) criticizes google desktop's behavior.

Why is iTunes better than Windows Media Player

Which is easier, hitting the space bar, or hitting CTRL+P. What's harder, hitting F10 or Ctrl+Up.

It's the little things sometimes. If I alt tab over to iTunes it's really easy for me to pause the current song by hitting the space bar, unlike windows media player which requires Ctrl+P. Volume control is also easier in iTunes because I can use Ctrl+Up or Down to change the volume.

I'm sure I could come up with a bunch more. Maybe I should point WiMP at my itunes directory and just try switching for a little while... course then I would have to give up podcasts... I wonder how good WiMP would be at syncing up to my ipod nano...

IT energy crisis reaching critical mass

First read this:
Intel announces major 2006/2007 roadmap changes: "At any rate, if this widely linked shootout is to be believed then Opteron does indeed wallop the new Xeons in terms of raw performance, and if one factors in performance/watt then it's absolute carnage."

The read this:
IT energy crisis reaching critical mass: "The old ways of throwing equipment at IT problems -- more air conditioning units, servers, UPS units -- is going to have to be revisited. And IT pros are going to be asked to find more efficient ways to increase reliability and computing capacity."

Interesting eh? Not exactly a good time for Intel's plans to fall apart. It would really be fascinating to see some analysis about Intel's performance over the last couple of years.

Torres Talking: Friendster is STILL creepy

Torres Talking: Friendster is STILL creepy: "Friendster apparently thought it was a good idea to send mail to all of the 'friends' I invited a year and half ago who decided to delete my invitation instead of joining. Of course, Friendster did this without my 'OK'."

I've never really liked friendster. Course it doesn't really make me feel any better to have that dislike validated.

Judge rebukes Microsoft over WMP bundling

Judge rebukes Microsoft over WMP bundling: "Last week, it emerged that Microsoft had submitted a draft marketing agreement to digital music player manufacturers that would have prohibited them from bundling any software other than Windows Music Player with their devices in exchange for installation CDs for Windows Media Player. One of the manufacturers cried foul, and as a result, Microsoft was given a harsh rebuke by Judge Kollar-Kotelly. "

Whoops.

CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on CC & Fair Use | Creative Commons

CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on CC & Fair Use | Creative Commons: "As life moves online, 'free uses' shrink. Because every act on a digital network produces a copy, and 'copies' trigger copyright law, there are vastly fewer 'free uses' in digital space than in analog space."

A good primer in why creative commons is good and why copyright law is getting wacky in the new digital age.

ArsTechnica: Anti-game activist Jack Thompson under investigation

Anti-game activist Jack Thompson under investigation: "Jack then reneged on his promise of a US$10,000 donation to the charity of the modder's choice, saying that his original bounty had been 'satire', and therefore not a legitimate promise."

I actually watched this one unfold on penny arcade. You can't make this stuff up. :-)

Apple steps up iPod 'tax' push | CNET News.com

Apple steps up iPod 'tax' push | CNET News.com: "Apple Computer is stepping up its push to get iPod accessory makers to pay for the right to connect to the popular music player."

Some would say that's as crazy as charging Sony a tax on the walkman because it wouldn't exist without music.

Firefly (aka best show ever)

Brian and I are watching firefly tonight. We saw the movie on opening day, I had seen the series first, Brian hadn't so we're catching him up.

I think this was the best show ever.

If you like any kind of sci-fi at all you should watch this.

Here is a good review of the movie Serenity (firefly movie) by Orson Scott.

Microsoft and Real Networks

Joel asked a question in my comments here.

It's tough to say what will happen now that Real Networks and Microsoft have teamed up. What usually happens when two mediocre players get together to try and make something great...

My prediction is that nothing interesting will happen. Microsoft doesn't have the whole platform, and neither does Real Networks. I don't think real has been a significant player in the online space for many years. (At least they haven't been in my conciousness for a long time)

Apple is definitely focused on the music platform. It will take something radical to blast Apple out of it's position as market leader. I think Apple has positioned the itunes music store very well. The store is designed to support the iPod. An iPod is something tangible, sure music has higher profit margins because the distribution costs are next to nothing.

I would predict that in order to replace the iTunes conglomerate there would need to be something that really addresses the rub of online music distribution.

I wont buy songs through the itunes music store because I am more restricted in how I can use it. Since Apple's DRM limits what I can do with the music, it is less valuable to me. I recently bought a CD at Sonic Boom that cost 17 bucks. I could've gotten the same music from iTunes for about 12 bucks. The extra five dollars were worth it to me though because I could put that music on both Gwen and my laptops, as well as have a hard copy in case those digital files are lost.

What does that mean for iTMS? How many people are not buying music because of that? Hard to say really. Why wont I encode my music as AAC or WMA? That one is not so hard. MP3 is a de-facto standard. Every portable music player supports it. Choosing another media format does nothing but benefit the owner of that format. By choosing WMA, I give Microsoft more business. By choosing AAC, I give Apple more business (the business I'm talking about is codec licensing, if I have a ton of WMA I'm going to demand that my audio player plays WMA, which costs the hardware manufacturer to license).

Ok so what does all this mean... I guess it means it's friday and I'm rambling. But it also means that your music player doesn't matter, your audio format does. Choose the platform with the widest support to encode your music in, and then pick the player that fits your model of how you work with music. I choose itunes to play my music because I have an iPod and an Airport Express. If another equally awesome or better set of peripherals come out for Windows Media Player, I can simply pick up my library and move it over to that player.

Now is the time where I would normally proof-read my post... but instead I'm going to not.

PC Pro: News: Warner chief threatens to scalp iTunes

Via Slashdot: PC Pro: News: Warner chief threatens to scalp iTunes: "A Warner Music executive has threatened to cut off Apple if Steve Jobs continues to refuse to give ground on iTunes Music Store pricing."

Personally I couldn't care less if the record labels pull out as I've never bought anything from the iTunes music store, and I don't plan on ever doing so as long as they ship their music DRM encumbered. But this really is crazy. Apple is the only online music store that has been successful at getting people to adopt DRMed music.

Nash's comments echoes those made last week by Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, who called for Apple to adopt variable pricing and share out revenues from iPod sales. (emphasis mine)

Do the labels honestly think they own all the music in the world. Did they make the same demand of Sony when the walkman became popuplar... because after all, without tapes to put in those walkmen they would've been useless.

I didn't realize just how strong the sense of entitlement is at the record labels until now.

Software ( + Hardware) can do anything

Kevin Schofield's Weblog: "People here really believe that software can do anything -- it's fundamentally built into the culture, all the way up to Bill."

Some support for my "Microsoft expects somebody else to build their iPod for them" theory. Gotta come up with a better name for that. Maybe it's the "Hardware doesn't matter" way of thinking.