“The Basic Unit of Bug Report Frustration”
Developers often treat bug reports like someone dumping a bag of shit on your doorstep, ringing the bell and telling you to clean it up. That’s not what they are. A bug report is someone pointing out that there’s some shit on your doorstep, they stepped in it, and maybe it should be cleaned up.
Either way, nobody likes stepping in shit. And nobody likes cleaning up shit. So the whole interaction starts off on the wrong foot, perhaps the one covered in shit. Your job, as developer or as reporter, is to deliberately steer it back to being a positive one where the developer wants to fix shit and the reporter wants to continue to report shit.
(This is his proposal for a talk at OSCON.)