Hearing from DevTools team

Got an opportunity to have a conversation with some of the Firefox DevTools team on January 31, 2018, during their work week in Toronto. Here's a memo from the hearing session. In random order.

Regular work flow

• Opening a dozen of bugs in browser tabs
  • A thread view like BzDeck might be useful
• Bug triage: showing search results, reading each bug one by one
  • Same; thread may make the process faster
• Advanced Search: always unselecting --- in the Resolution field first to search all bugs
  • Because the status (open vs closed) sometimes/often doesn't matter
  • All the search features in Bugzilla only show open bugs by default so closed bugs might be overlooked
• Managing bugs with bug mails: unread or read in email client
  • Unproductive
• Using My Dashboard to see requests
• Rare to see bugs on mobile
  • Current pages are not optimized anyway, hard to read

Annoyances

• Slow!
• Too many fields
• Advanced Search: hard to use
• Typos in comments tags
  • This will also be a problem if the Keywords field is changed from pre-defined keywords to tags
• Modal bug view: keywords and whiteboard are similar and complementary but in different categories
• Modal bug view: the layout looks like for mobile, could be improved
  • 2-column layout with CSS Grid may be the answer
• Comments in monospaced font: difficult to read
  • This will be solved once Markdown support is in place
  • Keep old comments monospaced in that case

Feature requests

• Try Server status like CI results on GitHub pull requests
• GitHub migration/integration: automatically close a bug (and vice versa?)
• Recently used products/components list on the new bug page
• New bug templates with pre-filled fields
  • Cloning a bug is a workaround, but it requires to open an existing bug first
• Editable comments
  • Typical use case: updating dead mailing list links
• Collapsible quotes in comments