Re: [platform-ui-dev] FYI Orion Bug Cleanup

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I believe it's
much more important to keep the Bugtracker accurate than to close some
interesting issues just to reduce a number.

Just to clarify, we did this in Orion
largely because we felt the backlog was *not* accurate. We started the
process of triaging the oldest bugs, and most commonly they were no longer
valid, already fixed, etc. Obviously in any old list of bugs there will
be some that are valid and some that are not, so there is no happy answer
that will get you to 100% accuracy quickly. The important bugs will always
find their way to the surface again - either by reopening or new bugs will
be entered. Our next step is we are going to do a triage marathon on Friday
with the 600 remaining open bugs, so we can get to the point where we have
nearly 100% accuracy on our bug backlog.

I'm certain the 8000 bug backlog in
Platform UI also has poor accuracy. My experience with that bug list is
that it is well triaged - in that the open bugs were mostly valid at the
time they were reported. However there tends to be a lot of duplicates
- because the backlog is so big the duplicates rarely get weeded out, even
when the bug is fixed the duplicates often remain open. Anyway the strategy
you guys have worked out using the bugzilla Genie is a more gentle approach
which is probably the better answer considering the massive size of the
user/adopter community for Platform. I guess the next step will be to start
closing the "stalebug" entries that remain inactive for a long
period even after the gentle ping.

John



From:      
 Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx>
To:      
 platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Date:      
 05/06/2015 04:46 AM
Subject:    
   Re: [platform-ui-dev]
FYI Orion Bug Cleanup
Sent by:    
   platform-ui-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

---

On 05/06/2015 10:16 AM, Lars Vogel wrote:
Working with filter works fine for you as you are an advanced
Bugzilla user. I think the majority of our Eclipse users, do not work with
filters. At least I don't in most cases. 
How does hiding relevant bugs help users? Andrey already
pointed to some very old bugs that are still very interesting and should
not be closed. Based on that example, we can assume that it's not possible
to automatically decide whether a bug should be closed as "not relevant
any more" or not.

Closing bugs without good reason (fixed, duplicate, invalid...) is hiding
a technical debt and rejecting thousands of valuable user requests just
to make it easier for a few people to work on their planning. Whereas Bugzilla
offers the necessary fields (target milestone, assignee) to work on planning,
no need to arbitrarily throw away user feedback.
Bugs status actually represents the state of the project, and keeping bugs
that are not fixed/invalid/duplicate/... as open is actually accurate:
they are still topics to work on, and anyone is free to work on it. Closing
it is just showing that no work is expected/requested on that topic. See
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html
for the various definitions of closed, none applies to some "old but
still real" bugs.
Many old bugs (id < 100000) have been addressed in the last months,
the strategy you mention would have hidden the progress that went on this
topic.
I believe it's much more important to keep the Bugtracker accurate than
to close some interesting issues just to reduce a number.

I believe this may work of Orion because this is still a "core"
team, the vast majority of bug reporters work for the same company, with
the same methods and maybe even the same boss. That's not the case of Platform
any more, there are multiple kinds of contributors, no-one really manage
or know what those are going to implement in next milestone.

-- 
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss,
by Red Hat
My
blog - My
Tweets_______________________________________________
platform-ui-dev mailing list
platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
To change your delivery options, retrieve your password, or unsubscribe
from this list, visit
https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/platform-ui-dev