Draft email to maintainers regarding Priority / Severity in Bugzilla

Matej Cepl mcepl at redhat.com
Tue Apr 21 15:44:47 UTC 2009


On 2009-04-20, 20:34 GMT, Jerry Amundson wrote:
> Severity is used to describe how bad a bug is for the reporter, 
> in the context of the specific component:
> * Urgent: Software is completely unusable, loses data, or the RPM
> won't update properly. Frequent or commonly encountered crashes.

I know that I might add here something which isn't in the 
official definition, but I would suggest this slightly different 
definition of severity (gained practice in evaluting it when 
I was a lawyer for one huge software company in the Czech 
republic):

the difference between Urgent and High, is that High makes THE 
PROGRAM IN QUESTION unsusable, Urgent makes WHOLE SYSTEM unusable 
(or it is a security bug).

Medium than means ... it is real bug, but with possible 
workarounds or at least part of the program is still usable.

Low is the rest.

(otherwise we get into discussion about minor/major functionality 
which doesn't have an end).

> I question the phrase, "... for the reporter ...", since it 
> really isn't for the reporter, correct?

Yes, it is for the reporter, but not (evaluated) by the reporter.  
IMHO.

> Can, or will, the voting system come into play? Then reporters, and bz
> account holders (e.g. Fedora/Red Hat *users*) don't lose all of the
> emotional "points" gained by submitting the report in the first place.

No.

> We want reporters (users) to make use of bugzilla.redhat.com, and not
> have them think of it as a black-hole of their personal time, where
> these fields are only controlled by others.  As sort of a way of
> giving something back emotionally, yet also providing feedback that
> could sway the severity one notch higher, if the bug warrants it.

I will gladly fight a flamewar over every other bug's severity, 
but voting makes the system useless (we can have a voting to 
indicate for us we are missing something, but it shouldn't be 
automatically translated into severity/priority).

Matej




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