Clint Byrum wrote:
I 100% support those who are managing bugs doing whatever they need to do to make sure users' issues are being addressed as well as can be done with the resources available. However, I would also urge everyone to remember that the bug tracker is not only a way for developers to manage the bugs, it is also a way for the community of dedicated users to interact with the project as a whole.
This is a classic dilemma in open source bug tracking: the data is worthwhile, but keeping it around is generally making the tool less usable as a task tracker to organize the work to be done. Most of it comes from the fact that we are using the same tool ("bugs") for bug reporting and task tracking, and those are different things. Most developers want to use a task tracker to organize and prioritize their work. They create "bugs" in Launchpad but what they are really doing is creating a task for them (or an immediate peer) to process later. They may look at bugs/tasks that someone outside the team creates, but that's a completely different workflow. So the tension here is that the tool presents unqualified user bugs in the same lists as qualified team tasks.
In a fully-controlled environment those tasks are separated. You have a bug reporting system, which is mostly a collection of symptoms. Specific squads of triagers work on verifying them, deduplicating them, giving them some criticality, and checking them again after every release. You also have a task tracking system, which is used by teams to organize their work and assign it between team members. Team members create tasks directly. They may look into the bug tracker for critical issues raised by triagers and create tasks to address some of those critical bugs.
This works well, but it supposes that you have a tool that enables those two workflows, and a triagers team to handle the first one. In open source communities it's generally hard to find people to work purely on symptoms triaging -- those who do tend to move to something more rewarding very quickly. And the tools generally handle the distinction between bug reporting and task tracking poorly... Which leads to the dilemma of throwing out unqualified symptoms data to keep the tool usable to organize work.
-- Thierry Carrez (ttx) __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: [email protected]?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
