Fedora bug triage - workflow proposal

[Jon Stanley]

Well, it was a great session at FUDCon.  A lot came out of it, and I'm
going to put some of them down here. The work flow suggested below I'd
a FESco vote on, since it really affects you guys.  This work flow was
discussed between myself, John Poelstra, and Will Woods at the Sunday
hackfest, and we agree that this is the correct way to move forward,
however, we want community input and buy-in on this, since it has
pretty far-reaching consequences.

Here is the lifecycle of a bug:

1)  Reporter files a bug report, it originates in NEW state
2)  Triage team looks at bug report, determines if dupe or
insufficient information exists to solve it. If there is not enough
information in the bug, then triage team puts the bug in NEEDINFO.  As
you will see below, this state has a finite life cycle associated with
it.
3)  Assuming bug survives through the triage team, it changes state to
ASSIGNED (triage team can put it in either NEEDINFO or CLOSED, as
appropriate).  Note that per the definition[1], ASSIGNED does not mean
that someone has actually agreed to take action, simply that the issue
is well defined and triaged accordingly
4)  Once a developer has taken responsibility for a bug and is
actively working on it, the state transitions to ON_DEV.
5)  Once an update addressing a bug exists in Bodhi, and is pushed to
updates-testing, the status automatically transitions to ON_QA
6)  When the update is pushed to stable, Bodhi optionally closes the
bug automatically.  If the update does not auto-close the bug, it
transitions to NEEDINFO_REPORTER, with a comment explaining that the
update has been pushed to stable, and to update and test in the new
release.

Note that at any step of the above process, the maintainer can "fast
track" the bug, and change it to ASSIGNED.  The triage team is not
going to look at bugs that are not in NEW or NEEDINFO state.  On the
flip side of that, it is not a maintainer's responsibility to look at
bugs that are in NEW any longer.  They can focus their energy on the
bugs that are ASSIGNED to them.

Also, maintainers should not be allowed to set priority on bugs.
Setting severity is fine.  Only QA or releng should set priorities.
This allows us to look at things in a sane manner (which is impossible
now since severity and priority fields come from /dev/urandom
seemingly), and possibly lessen the reliance on blocker bugs (though
blockers are useful in their own right, so don't think that we are
going to eliminate them any time soon).

It was also decided that when a bug is in NEEDINFO for one month, it
will be closed.  Maintainers would need to realize that putting a bug
in NEEDINFO is putting it on the fast track for closure.

I think that's all that I have to say on this topic right now, let me
know if I'm missing anything or this is complete hogwash :)

-Jon

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/page.cgi?id=bug_status.html#verified