Matthew Revell interviewed Cody Russell while at UDS-L in Dallas, November 2009.

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From: Matthew Revell
Subject: User testing: Cody Russell
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:07:19 +0000

Again, a very rough set of notes:

Cody Russell

History with Launchpad: was using it for bug tracking for a while. Has
reported a few bugs. Mostly used it for tracking his own projects (the
Canonical projects he's supposed to be doing).

He works for the Desktop Experience team.

Now he's doing more upstream work, using Gnome Bugzilla and Gnome Git.

His own Launchpad profile page is his main starting point. Chromium
autocompletes there when he types "l" in the address bar.

He looks at all bugs that are in progress.

Because he goes back and forth between Bugzilla and LP, he's not sure
if that means all bugs in progress that are assigned to him. He makes
a distinction between those assigned to him and those that are
assigned to him that he's working on right now.

He wants to see a list of all bugs that are assigned to him and filter
them based on what he's working on right now. He has that available to
him in Bugzilla. In Bzilla, "My bugs" he can see different statuses on
the bugs (New, unconfirmed, assigned) -- he knows that "ASSIGNED" bugs
are those he's actively working on to some extent.

He can see all the bugs that are related to him in the "Participation" tab.

Has to URL hack in Launchpad.

When he's assigned a bug, he gets an email but also maintains a list
of Tomboy notes of things he's working on as it's easier to organise.

If he decides he's going to work on a particular bug, he'll copy the
URL and put it in a Tomboy note. Then he can see what bugs he's
working on by looking at the Tomboy note.

His LP home page has a tonne of stuff on there so there's too much
there to know what he's actually working on right now. The user info
takes up a good third or half of the page. What he wants is a listing
of bugs that he cares about, rather than his memberships and his own
location. (He's asking for a dashboard.) Maybe it's a page designed
for other people.

What he's most interested in are the bugs that he's working on right
now, rather than all that other stuff. He wants to make a bug as in
progress, I'm guessing, and then view that list.

He does more work in git and bugzilla. Has only been working at
Canonical since Feb or March. Working on gtk upstream.

LP has quite a bit more info, more buttons, more links to click. Less
direct. So much more info in LP. Some of it is not something that he's
trying to get at all the time.

Sometimes he's navigating between branches and bugs and they seem very
separate. If he's trying to get from a code review to see what bug
it's fixing, he has to go into LP.

He gets an email with a diff but doesn't get a description of what it
is that the merge proposal is trying to fix! So he has to go over and
visit the the bug link from the merge proposal to see what the code
review's trying to do. He doesn't get to just do it from email, he has
to click through.

Have to scroll down to get to the link to the bug to see what the bug
is actually about. Would prefer to have the bug description in the
merge proposal page/email.

Likes the way LP does the merge requests it's just it'd be nice to get
to the description of the bug more easily.

At his previous job, they used Sourceforge Enterprise Edition. They
didn't particularly like it. They had to hack it up to support bzr.
His general workflow there always worked exactly the same and it was
always in one place. Once you assigned a bug to yourself could mark it
as in progress once working on it and then mark it as need review.
Once that happens the bzr deamon they'd set up would automatically
attach the diffs onto that bug.

he likes the idea of the merge requests on a separate page but it's
just a case of getting used to it.

Bugzilla is not especially fancy or nice.

He doesn't need to communicate between Bugzilla and Launchpad.

Usually, if there's a discussion about something gtk, it's on the
bugzilla, irc or gtk ML. Sometimes people will link to an Ubuntu bug
from bugzilla to LP. If they do, he'll read it.

As an upstream, he can't go to all the downstreams and start checking
their bug trackers. It's the responsibility of the distro to push bugs
upstream. Ubuntu is very good about doing that. They push a link to
Bugzilla.

Likes that merge proposals automatically attach the diffs.

Colloboration is someone posting a bug or branch against his branch.
He finds that the copyright assignment requirement is preventing
people from merging stuff against what he works on in Canonical.

Can't really say that LP is more or less collaborative than Bugzilla
because his work in LP isn't as open as his upstream work. As an
upstream, he doesn't really have to communicate downstream.

He's planning to stop using LP for this Ubuntu cycle because all of
his work will be done upstream.

If LP plugged in better with Bugzilla, that'd be cool. If he could
file a bug in LP and LP automatically push that up to the upstream
Bugzilla and then proxy comments and patches between the two, that'd
be good but it seems like a lot of work. It wouldn't make much of a
difference for him, though, but it might be easier for someone who
never uses Bugzilla. Actually, it wouldn't make any difference to him
either way. He doesn't think upstream would care, if it worked okay.

One thing, he doesn't know how it would work .... there's a patch and
it draws it with a strikethrough (Bugzila that is). That's a patch
they've rejected. In LP you'd attach a branch or attach a patch as a
comment. The trouble with sharing bugs and comments between Bugzilla
and LP is that on Bugzilla they carry on using patches and in LP we'd
carry on using links to bzr branches. So, that could be a problem.

It's kinda fun to watch karma. Used to have something like that in Bugzilla.

Occassionally he files bugs against other projects or maybe makes a
branch and proposes it for merging but after that he leaves it alone.

All over the person profile page are little yellow icons. He didn't
know what they were. Turns out they're meant to be pencils and the
button you click to edit something. A little bit unusual looking that
there's so many of them all over the place.

It's not always clear how to get to all the little microprojects that
he works on. He often has to go through bug mail.

He'd have to go to his own profile page and scroll to the bottom to
find the projects he's working on, if he didn't go into his bug mail.
Or he'd search.

The search box, LP icon and home page link being at the bottom of the
page is unintuitive. It's at the top on every other website.
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