you can help triage bzr bugs

[Robert Collins]

On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 18:56 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:

I think this is a good thing to do. I have a couple of key things I'd
like anyone doing triage to be aware of.

>  * See if you can find a duplicate, just by searching for a similar
> message

_Please_ look for a matching traceback. We have many bugs that can
trigger the same symptoms but are genuinely different, and we can also
have bugs that trigger from the same function but have different higher
level call stacks. As Martin says, if you make a mistake, its not a big
deal, we can undo 'mark as duplicate'. In Ubuntu, in some projects with
similar properties to bzr, triagers often find this hard to do right. I
suggest that if you are unsure, say 'I think this is a duplicate of
XYZ', and let a developer assess it further.


> Triage according to;
> 
>  * critical: data loss or seriously broken functionality
>  * high: blocks work for some people
>  * low: otherwise

I realise the following two items are a bit meta and not really related
to the 'lets get more people caring about the bug tracker'. So if you're
interested in QA feel free to ignore them :).

My second point is about 'high' and 'low' here; we've previously been
making a lot of bugs medium as a default, and I think we should keep
doing that, otherwise we're just making newer bugs low because our
process has changed, not because they've been compared and found less
important.

Finally, missing features shouldn't really be considered high, just
because you can't do something without the feature. Generally I think we
should make these 'wishlist', and if they happen to be something that a
dev is working on, they could be either upgraded, or simply marked in
progress.

> I think it's realistic to expect we could fairly quickly get some
> triagers who're often helping users faster than they are helped now,
> letting developers fix more bugs, and rarely having any changes
> undone.  If it works, it would be pretty cool. 

That would be cool.

-Rob
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20091201/64901590/attachment.pgp