Subject: Re: BugZilla - stale bugs
From: Paul Egli (pegli@stu.parkland.cc.il.us)
Date: Tue Dec 11 2001 - 13:57:27 CST
Quoting Jesper Skov <jskov@zoftcorp.dk>:
> I hereby declare bugs that haven't been touched for 2+ months for stale.
That might be a bit hasty, IMHO. Perhaps 2+ binary releases... (?)
> In the future, I will close the following classes of stale bugs:
>
> o QA TO QUALIFY:
> Apparently whoever filed the bug (and others) are not annoyed
> by this bug anymore, and they forgot to close it.
>
> o OPEN/SUBMIT where someone has requested additional information
> and not received it:
> Submitter apparently don't care anymore - and without the extra
> information, the bug is useless.
This sounds good to me. Though, we might want an organized way of determining
and keeping track of who has contacted who. Perhaps, simply, the bug's owner is
responsible; if you want to investigate, take ownership. Once you've gathered
more info, post your findings and re-assign the bug (or whatever is
appropriate). I personally don't want to e-mail a user asking for more info, if
they're already receiving such inquiries from other developers. Which reminds
me...
For bugs logged by users who are not active in abiword development, I think it
is important to send an e-mail to the user asking specific questions, not just
add a comment to the bug report in bugzilla saying you need more info. If a
church secretary logs a bug, s/he might never visit bugzilla again, but would
probably be delighted to reply to a friendly e-mail (not the ones bugzilla
automatically sends out ;-).
> For the latter class, I've considered adding a new CLOSED/NEEDINFO state
> to bugzilla. Sam, do you know hard it would be to do so? Meanwhile, I'll
> be using CLOSED/INVALID.
>
> Note that this does not mean that we ignore those bugs. If you find one
> of your bugs closed as stale because you've been busy or out of time,
> simply reopen it, adding the necessary information to make it a valid
> bug again.
>
> It's simply a way to keep the BugZilla backlog from getting out of hand:
> skimming the same old set of bugs when looking for stuff to do is very
> tiring (and rather frustrating, actually). The developers' time is
> limited - this is a way to forcibly shift some of the BugZilla triage to
> the users who actually report and care about the bugs.
This also sounds good to me. Anything else we can do to clean up the bug
database would make it easier for a QA man like me to get back in on the
project (e.g. fix such annoyances as the one Piotr mentioned in his e-mail.
There seems to be lots of these quirks lingering in our version of bugzilla).
> Jesper - believing it's time we cleaned up the mess
I agree. I'm sorry I haven't been of much help in the bug database lately.
Please let me know how I can be of help (meta-QA work on bugzilla, or whatever
else).
Thanks,
/~pegli
=--------------------------------------=
Paul Egli, pegli@stu.parkland.cc.il.us
http://csc.parkland.cc.il.us/~pegli/
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