Hello, everybody!
In order to constantly making things better, we changed the way to deal
with newly written Writer issues a few weeks ago.
In brief:
- The dummy user "Writerneedsconfirm" will get all newly written issues
that have the component "Word processor" set.
- After these issues got confirmed (and flagged "NEW"), the Writer QA
at Sun will proceed with them.
Note: People with "CanConfirmRights" still can assign new issues
directly to someone.
Before, all newly written Writer issues got "pushed" into the account of
MRU who cross-read all of them and then forwarded them to the respective
specialists, mostly Sun QA and dev. As a result, all those issues
immediately look like "well adressed as Sun Dev/QA already sits on it".
And "the community" turns back to "produce more issues", making the
"well-addressed" pile one issue higher. Several developers and QA people
at Sun have 500+ issues in their intray, not likely to ever solve all these.
Let me put it even harder:
In this lagre and growing community, writing an issue is not
automatically a contribution for the project. Because it is simply too
simple to put "A phantastic dream, an odd idea or just a manifest of bad
mood and foul language" into an issue, submit it and forget it.
Please wait :-)
Before you start shouting "This is OpenSource and all is democratic and
all regulations are counter-productive and not acceptable"....: You are
right. Beside this, "THE important issues" must be written (and no
matter who does it!). They will get attention, become a show stopper,
bind ressources (thus trigger high costs "somewhere") and will be taken
care about closely. And these issues need to be written, no doubt about
that.
Although Sun is a large contributor for the OOo community, this does NOT
mean that all issues can be expected to "automatically be handled and
fixed by Sun people as soon as the respective submitter desires".
Several comments in issues tell that some people will keep believing
that writing an issue does automatically trigger a fix in a short time.
This is simply wrong. At least in Hamburg, developers and ressources
still do not rain as fast as new issues get written. Be it a defect or
feature, "developer ressources" (= Dev, QA, Docu, RelEng) must deal with
it.
A sceanrio:
You stumble over a written issue. It raises your attention, you
reproduce it, you can see that "while toying around that", there is many
more defects in this area as well as "features I have seen in similar
products". You see that it is in a developers intray. It is
"Unconfirmed" and has target "Office Later". What do you do?
(A) You spend time to search for duplicate defects and enhancements in
order to close that one or the other(s).
(B) You believe "that developer knows best himself and this is not the
time to contact him/her and I wouldn't know what exactly to tell" and
leave it as it is.
(C) You write down all the defects and "overdue features" you find and
submit them into issuezilla so that they will not get lost.
My estimation: Far too many do choose (B) and (C).
In recent times, I got the rough estimation, that far more than half of
all newly written issues are duplicates, invalid, fixed in the meantime,
you-name-it. I am talking about the "sum of all incoming issues", mainly
by people not very closely involved in OOo Dev or QA yet.
Since it is easy to submit a new issues (and shall stay like that) -
What can be a solution?
(1) Make more people deal with issues.
(2) Help people to efficiently do so.
(3) Constantly improve (1)+(2)
This new default user for writer issues is a tiny step for (2) to avoid (B).
An issue being assigned to "~needsconfirm" should tell everyone
- "Please go ahead and deal with it, it waits for YOU to do so!"
- "This issue has > 50% chance to be invalid or duplicate or needs
further information."
Commensts like "reproducible like this..." or "not reproducible like
this..." as well as a description of possible workarounds are an
important part of QA work and always welcome. Even if you do not have
the rights to flip the "Unconfirmed" to NEW"... Just do it!
Have a nice day!
Stefan Baltzer
QA Writer
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