How relevant is Bugzilla voting?

Recently, an interesting question came up in bug 35973. Do Bugzilla votes really reflect the real interest of the broader community in a single feature?

From my experience the voting system is only one side. You also need to look at a flipside of a coin. Bugzilla votes are positive votes. They do not reflect ranking. It depends on many factors. For example, a smaller community can become more involved and push any Bugzilla issue up to the top. Even I used blogging in the past to push Bugzilla votes. But this doesn’t mean that Bugzilla votes are useless. They still help to classify the importance of a feature within certain parameters.

For this particular bug I also have a comment. The discussion about efforts, resource consumptions and openness in it is a good point. Everybody is allowed to sponsor an implementation of any feature and contribute it to Eclipse.org. Frankly, if I would sponsor a bunch of developers to implement features in Eclipse this would probably be number 10,001 on my list of 10,000 items. But this doesn’t mean that it will never happen. Get involved and start hacking. You’ll love it!

One thought on “How relevant is Bugzilla voting?

  1. When it comes to ranking (any ranking), you have to pose a question before you start the ranking/sequencing/voting/comparing/whatever.

    Sometimes, we don’t notice this, when we think in our own head without communicating.

    In java: try to rank something when everybody has its own secret implementation of Collator.compare().

    The interesting thing is: “real interest” might not be the same for evereybody in any moment of time. I like “vote” more than “real interest”, because it doesn’t pretend to be well defined.

    To have more than vote, you have to pose questions (plural) what to vote for.

    Gerd

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