hi Patrick,

Got your VM.

We have a blog here in the Engineering department at Zipcar, and we use for general progress reports. Fleet/Operations has just created one for themselves, as well. We try to send a blog out to everyon in the company each week (on Fridays), and cover current and a little future progress.

You’d quickly fall asleep if you tried to read our blog in reverse chonological order, though, because the narrative flow from one week to the next is non-existant, and we reiterate a lot (“I’m doing XYZ next week”, followed by “This week, I finished XYZ”). But you could ask “what were we doing last July”, read one entry around there, and get a pretty good idea.

But I’d argue that you’re putting too much stock in blogs. The trouble with them is there’s only a handful of ways to slice the data: temporally, by keyword, and maybe by category. It’s really just a diary. While there’s something nice about the simplicity of blogs, I think this simplicity gets people believing that blogs are the end-all solution for many kinds of problems; the reality of it is, I think a lot of blogs are used in leiu of a more appropriate tool (that might not exist yet).

For example, I see Bugzilla as a better (though still not ideal) solution when it comes to software development. Bugzilla lets us keep up with what we’re going to do AND notify the appropriate people when progress is made on the items they’re interested in. But bugzilla is just blog * N, and the trouble with it is that it’s very granular and doesn’t give a good “macro” perspective. Bugzilla forces us to pose everything as a problem, and it isn’t good for much else, like medium- or long-term planning or “we hired an intern this week” (status = RESOLVED ;-)

So we use MT as our meta-blog, and that keeps people informed about things without the intimidation of going into bugzilla and looking around. It also lets us speak to some of the non-bugs I mentioned above.

But back to Bugzilla, if you’ll let me ride the high horse for a moment. Bugzilla also lacks a coherent categorization feature when you have hundreds or thousands of bugs. You could talk about the “component” of your software product that this bug applies to, but with a quickly changing landscape, you’d end up spending a ton of time adding and retiring components. Also, components are frequently in the solution space, and bugzilla is for reporting problems, so bugs will get mis-classified. Now you need someone to go through all of them as they come in, diligently verifying and reclassifying, etc.

On that note, I’ve been thinking a lot about QA lately, and how perspective changes a problem and its possible solution set. I could enter a bug called “I have an ear infection and need some antibiotics”, or I could enter one called “I can’t hear well and I keep getting dizzy.” The former is really a solution stated without symptoms, a self-diagnosis. I hear these every day, and they’re usually wrong. I instinctively tell people to back up, tell me what the symptoms are, explain whether they can reproduce it or not, etc. When a problem is rephrased like this, I’m no longer biased toward their solution, and I can perhaps provide something better than they had in mind.

A better method of classification might be to a “google news”-style summary page that classifies bugs simply by finding commonalities within the text. New components are auto-generated, and Bugzilla can tell you which components are the most active right now. This lets you group and identify common problems, so you’ll more easily spot duplicates and can see which parts of the system are most prone to failure at any time. Do you know much about this kind of data mining and how it works?

Anyway, what I’m really talking about is the reporting part of bugzilla, which is not really a part of bugzilla at all. I think bugzilla was created to solve an operational problem of software development, not an analytical/planning problem, so it’s not yet great for aggregation and so on. Certainly the built-in bugzilla metrics (like the “# open bugs over time” graph) are cute but say nothing that you don’t already know.

I think it’s time for something else. I want to sit down with a couple other people and figure out what it is.

Carl