Draft email to maintainers regarding Priority / Severity in Bugzilla

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Wed Apr 22 14:47:05 UTC 2009


On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 03:44 -0400, Christopher Beland wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 12:37 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Bugzilla is a tool whose function is improving the efficiency of
> > development of software. It is not there to massage the ego of those who
> > submit reports to it.
> 
> I take your point, but it's obviously better if bug reporters are
> treated politely and fairly and have a positive view of the process,
> since this encourages more participation and better bug reports.
> 
> Leaving the Severity field up to the reporter (or the triager, if the
> reporter is timid) is way to avoid insult if Priority is set low, since
> it can be recorded that the bug is Severe in context but low Priority in
> the maintainer's queue due to project-wide context.  On the other hand,
> it's probably even more insulting to channel such input to a field
> that's essentially ignored.  

That's the point in a nutshell. Deferring to reporters when setting
severity / priority isn't really being "polite" or "fair" because these
fields then get ignored. I'd rather have a productive process than
scratch people's egos.

> We could also change the dimensions of analysis to be more useful.  For
> example, we could have "Type" which might be {"crasher", "install
> problem", "malfunction", "usability", "cosmetic", "enhancement"} plus
> "exposure" as the product of number of user affected times frequency of
> encounter: {"narrow", "moderate", "wide"}.  Combining these two less
> subjective measures might actually produce a useful ranking of which
> bugs should be handled first.  (Is that a problem worth solving better
> than the status quo?)

At that point we're back to hacking up Bugzilla, I think...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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