[W4RH4WK55]

Do we have any indication that telemetry leads to an actually improvent of the software's overall quality at this point?

It seems to me that even with excessive levels of telemetry, software remains buggy and sluggish most of the time.

[hedora]

I think telemetry collection is a symptom of deeper organizational issues.

For instance, I've never worked with a competent release manager who said "we need more field telemetry!"

Instead, the good ones invariably want improved data mining of the bugtracker, and want to increase the percentage of regression bugs that are caught in automated testing. They also generally want to increase the percentage of automated test failures that are root-caused.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f40-change-request-pr...

> I can speak as a GNOME developer—though not on behalf of the GNOME project as a community—and say: GNOME has not been “fine” without telemetry. It’s really, really hard to get actionable feedback out of users, especially in the free and open source software community, because the typical feedback is either “don’t change anything ever” or it comes with strings attached. Figuring out how people use the system, and integrate that information in the design, development, and testing loop is extremely hard without metrics of some form. Even understanding whether or not a class of optimisations can be enabled without breaking the machines of a certain amount of users is basically impossible: you can’t do a user survey for that.

[justinclift]

That's super funny, as the Gnome project is very widely regarded as either ignoring their users desires, or being dismissive of them.

Perhaps instead of adding telemetry, they need to... actually start listening to their users (finally)?

Ha! Like that will ever happen.

[worble]

No, but it does allow them to makes lots of pretty graphs they can show to upper management in those long multi hour meetings.

[rcxdude]

The problem being that inevitably the 'improvement' gets measured through the same telemetry figures which are being optimised, so of course it's percieved by developers has helping them improve things.

[romanovcode]

To add to the point: Alphabet has probably most data than any other company (except FB I suppose) and they still can't release a good product that people will actually use no matter how much data they have.

[dschuetz]

There's this anecdote (which might have been made up entirely to make a point):

Restaurant management wanted to compare different soup offerings by counting orders from each soup to determine which ones were more popular. They have selected the most popular two offerings, the rest were scrapped in order to safe money on ingredients. Soon after, not only did the order numbers of those two soup offerings drop, the total number of soup orders dropped. How come? Well, maybe nobody has asked the customers if the offered soup was tasty at all. A quick survey revealed that customers make the popular choice, find out it's crap, and then do not ever order soup again in that restaurant, or in rarer cases give the other one a shot. It turned out, the most popular offer was basically cheap crap nobody wanted to eat, and when there's nothing else, they keep ordering the same, or never visit that restaurant again.

Telemetry does not tell anything about user preferences. Who ever is selling you that idea, does not either.

[jeffbee]

Alphabet markets two linux-based operating systems for consumer devices that are extremely popular. Telemetry from the field makes android and chromeos better operating systems.