package shepherding

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 17:36, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hi Alexander,
> 
> > I tend to not rely on them much. The problem with them is that the
> > reporter often sets this to what he thinks, which is always high of
> > course. I've had several people changing it back to high when i've
> > changed it to a lower priority.
> 
> Really? Then tell them not to. That should not happen, and the fact that
> some reporters do this should not stop us from putting these tags (or at
> least the tag severity) to good use.

Telling someone not to do that sometimes help, but only for that
particular person. I have better things to do with my extremely limited
time than educating the whole world about what bugzilla is used for.
Each time I need to explain bugzilla to someone its time taken from
fixing other bugs or implementing new features. Its sad, but thats my
reallity.

> >  This, coupled with the fact that its
> > very hard to classify priority like that makes me just ignore these
> > fields.
> 
> For severity it is obvious when a report is security related, and only
> crashes should be marked as "high". That would give you at least three
> levels of useful severities.
> 
> I would say that if priority stays around it should possibly be used as
> a developer only tag.

The setup for the Nautilus module in gnome bugzilla is pretty nice and
works well for me. This modules has almost 1000 open bugs, and basically
only two people working on it. However, we have a great bugsquad that
reads all new incomming bug reports, asks for more information if its
missing, marks bugs as duplicates, collect information from duplicates
to the dup-head, closes invalid or old fixed bugs. Then they mark all
bugs that are important (common crashers, bugs with patches, heavily
dup:ed bugs, or bugs that just seem important) with a priority of high
or more. Then the nautilus developers filter their incoming bugzilla
email so that high or more goes in to its own folder. This means we have
a fighting chance to actually read all important bugzilla email, and
still get work done.

If course, this requires a dedicated group of bugzilla trawlers doing
some pretty boring, trivial work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a short-sighted crooked senator with nothing left to lose. She's a 
sharp-shooting hypochondriac politician from a family of eight older brothers. 
They fight crime!