Two of the previous suggestions that I think would significantly  
improve things are John's idea about CC autocomplete, and Jesse's idea  
of "next action.

For the autocomplete, it would be even better if we searched against  
full name and all associated email addresses on an account, and  
started by ranking results with a combination of:

- how active a user is on bugzilla
- how commonly a user is cc'ed on the same bugs as the logged in user
- the context of the specific product and component of the bug

And from that ranking start to bring in some quicksilver / Ed Lee /  
adaptive learning awesomesauce.

In terms of Jesse's "next action" idea, the reason I really want this  
is to be able to differentiate between bugs that are "uiwanted, but we  
are still working on implementation stuff" and "all work has stopped  
until the uiwanted keyword is removed."  The "next action" field would  
of course clear that up significantly, and that's just one specific  
example, there are a lot of other cases where it would streamline our  
work.

Two new suggestions that I think would also be useful

1 - User Profile Pages.  Not in the "turning bugzilla into a social  
network for dating" sense, but more being able to navigate on a  
particular user and found out how many bugs they have completed, how  
many they have filed, what components they generally work in, what  
time zone they are in (if they want to disclose it), what their irc  
nick is, etc.  This could also be a place for people to display any  
Friends of the Tree badges they have earned, and the profile system  
could almost have a kind of a game design feel.  Basically this is  
your bugzilla gamertag.  Various actions on bugzilla could increase  
your gamerscore.  Goals of the design could include: making bugzilla  
users feel like they are making progress and achieving things by using  
the system, improving our view which members of our community are  
extremely active and helpful, and overall helping to answer the common  
question of "who is [username]?"  Note that I am not suggesting that  
people would be able to friend each other, only that people could  
become friends of particular bugs (we already support this :)

2 - API for accessing the same type of activity that is exposed  
through bugmail.  I think reading plain text bugmail as an overall  
workflow each day isn't very well designed, and it is also something  
that many of us spend hours doing. I have a few ideas of how we could  
create various Web based interfaces that completely replace the need  
for individual bugmail messages, but the first step towards being able  
to experiment with new interfaces and workflows is getting access to  
the stream of data.

Cheers,
-Alex

On Jun 12, 2009, at 8:38 AM, John J. Barton wrote: