[higgins-dev] Proposal - Higgins bug-fix criteria

[Brian Walker <BWalker@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All - as a follow up from an action item I had from last weeks Higgins call, below is a proposed set of bug criteria we could use as a guide to determine whether bug-fixes will go into a Higgins bug-fix release (e.g. 1.0.X) or whether it be rolled into a future major (e.g. X.0) or minor/point (e.g. 1.X) release. I looked around the Eclipse site at other projects, but did not find any other example critieria to compare to - but I may have missed some things. Please let me know if you are aware of other Eclipse project criteria we could compare to.

Please review the below prosed criteria and offer comments:

- Higgins patch releases (e.g. 1.0.X number scheme) would include exclusively bug fixes (e.g. no new features/enhancements) for the following type of bug severity:
a) bugs in any of the Higgins platform components that cause a crash of the overall Higgins system or Higgins based application.
b) bugs that cause a loss of any persistent data.
c) bugs that cause a severe security breach where sensitive end user data can be exposed to the outside world or accessed by unauthorized users.
d) bugs that cause a "major" feature to not function and there is no workaround available to accomplish the same task.
e) bugs that cause a "major" business impact such as loss of revenue or customers.

For all other bugs fixes of lesser severity than those described above, they will be included as part of major or minor (point) Higgins releases and not necessarily included as part of a special bug fix release. By way of example, the bug fixes included in the major or minor (point) releases would include such items as:
- bugs that cause an aspect of a feature to not work properly.
- bugs are that are cosmetic in nature, misspellings in dialogs, annoying to users, etc.

regards...Brian

Brian Walker
VP of Engineering
Parity Communications Inc
cell: 781-801-0254