Our Message to Opera Software ASA Concerning their Bug Reporting Policy

The message below was e-mailed to Opera Software ASA and placed on their beta newsgroup on 12/29/02. So far there has been no private response. In a response in the newsgroup, Rijk van Geijtenbeek, who had an Opera e-mail address stated:

"Opera doesn't want to have a public accesible bugs database. Period. No excuses, that is just the policy."

CodeHouse™ believes that hiding information from consumers that may be detrimental to them is never a good idea. CodeHouse™ has taken the position that Opera Software ASA's attempt to conceal their bugs from the very developers who are supporting their product cannot result in a product that is good for consumers. Although CodeHouse™ will continue to support Opera in Visual Menu, we will no longer strive to make our website Opera compatible.

We would like to work with Opera Software ASA. But until they are willing to create an environment that is conducive to creating a browser that is in the best interests of consumers as well as developers, we can no longer subsidize their testing program with our free labor.

Message to Opera Software ASA

I find Opera an elegant web browser, and I would like to include Opera support in a product I am developing. I am puzzled, however, by the procedures you seem to have developed for the handling of bugs.

I submitted 4 bug reports to you at about 8:30 a.m., EST on 12/25/02. All the bugs were reported against Opera 7.0, build 2577.

I need not tell you that it was time-consuming to isolate these problems and write test cases. This is not the first time I have submitted bug reports to you. I don't mind submitting bug reports for your betas in the spirit of contributing to the efforts to build a more robust product.

What puzzles me, however, is that I do not seem to be given a receipt or a tracking number for bugs I submitted. Furthermore, I am ignorant of the process for accessing your bug database. This is distressing because it means that I am not only spending time laboriously finding bugs that are identified in the bug database, but also that I am probably reproducing the efforts of other programmers who have probably found the same bug. Much effort is wasted.

Unless I see the bugs that I reported are fixed, I will never be able to tell when these bugs might be fixed in the future -- or if you will deem them "features" and not fix them. Even if I was in error and they are neither bug nor feature, nobody else will reap the benefit of knowing this because, again, you don't avail a bug database. And it becomes a problem knowing how long I should keep my test cases at the URL I specified. And because bugs aren't assigned numbers, there is no way for me to reference other bugs that have been submitted, including my own.

I know that I speak on behalf of many developers. We would like to help you make Opera as bug-free as possible. But in turn, we need some cooperation in our efforts to help you achieve this so that we don't spend our time duplicating efforts, or working on problems that have been already identified. I urge you to follow the lead of Mozilla and have a standard means of reporting bugs and obtaining feedback.

Ed Phillips