unhandled bugs in bugzilla

[Jay Berkenbilt]

I'm concerned about bugs whose State in bugzilla remains NEW for a
long time.  I'm afraid that these bugs aren't been noticed and my get
overlooked.  This has happened to me before, though it happens in a
minority of cases.

Right now, if I go into bugzilla and click on "My Bugs", I have 11
bugs that come up.  Of these, 7 have state "NEW".  Two of those have
priority "High".  I believe that I am very careful not to abuse
priority and severity.  I set priority to "High" when the fix is
trivial (low cost, high value) and we're in a period such as this
(beta release before freeze) or when the consequences of the bug are
severe but not severe enough to cause a catastrophic failure.  Of the
seven bugs whose status is NEW, only two are very recent, and those
are a few days old.  The rest are much older.  The oldest has been
"NEW" for almost a year, and I posted to it 5 months ago asking
politely why there hadn't been any activity.

Please understand that I am asking this as an honest question.  I
sincerely appreciate the effort that goes into making these releases,
and understand that a lot of people are up to their ears in work.  I
mean this message as an expression of concern and request for advice
rather than as a complaint or a nag.  For example, could there be a
problem that certain products' default bug owners are no longer there
or are not as responsive as they should be?  Could it be that some
people are in the habit of paying attention to their bugs but not
accepting them so that their state turns into ASSIGNED?  We use
bugzilla in house for our own bug tracking.  I encourage my people to
click on the "My Bugs" link regularly to make sure they haven't missed
anything.  We don't have the daily nag messages for stale NEW bugs
enabled, but I bet enabling that would help somewhat.  I'd like to
figure out a way of making sure bugs I report don't get ignored
without becoming a pest.

Thanks for any advice.

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb at ql.org>
http://www.ql.org/q/