Interesting comments

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 20:46 +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
> (reposting -- somehow my previous attempt to send this via email 
> was unsuccessful)
> > I've seen similar threads before. The thing I generally take
> > out of them, which I really tried to get MDV bug triagers to
> > buy into, is follow up. Triaging isn't a drive-by operation,
> > you have to follow up the bug. You really should be in CC for
> > any bug you triage.
> 
> Hello,

<snip>

A big AOL-ish +1 to everything I snipped :)

>     6. There is that whole issue of prioritization. Whenever 
>        I talked with Luis about bug triaging prioritization was 
>        the issue most on his mind. Currently, b.r.c doesn’t have 
>        any good metrics for prioritizing bugs (all 
>        priorities/severities/votes are manageable by reporters 
>        and thus totally worthless) and nobody invented a good way 
>        how to make it work. Any ideas are very much welcomed; 
>        I have not much to say about it, just felt need to note it 
>        here.

See my mail in the Wiki redesign thread. I had a policy for handling
severity / priority for the Mandriva bug squad which was generally
supported by maintainers, reporters and zappers, and seemed to work
quite well. You can see it in the links from that mail.

Priority and severity can be set by reporters in MDV Bugzilla. It was my
experience that reporters would frequently inflate these values in their
initial reports. However, if a triage team member then re-set them to a
more appropriate value, most reporters would leave them alone after
that. Only a couple of the more 'gigantic pain in the ass' reporters who
firmly believe every bug they report is gigantic smoking crater that
must be fixed yesterday would override the changes, and those reporters
we handled on a case-by-case basis (using the PLF orbital laser...)

So I think, with a good policy that had developer buy-in, we (the
BugZappers) could successfully handle prioritization, and this would
provide a major benefit to overworked maintainers in terms of helping
them work on the most significant bugs first.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net