Unity 7 & Compiz bug triage

[Will Cooke]

Dear bug squad,

We've had a little shuffle around recently and I've been very fortunate to
add Marco, Eleni and Andrea to the desktop team.  This means that we have
taken on the planning and execution of the direction for Unity 7, Compiz
and Nux.  With the 16.04 LTS release firmly on the horizon I want to start
focusing on that release as soon as possible, and to that end I have done
some poking around in the Unity 7 and Compiz bugs.

In order for us to best target our efforts we need to have a clear view of
which bugs are causing the biggest pain points.  Heat is a useful metric
here, but while we have around 800 bugs which are just "NEW" in Unity 7 we
could find ourselves not being able to see the wood for the trees [1].
And there will also be a large number of bugs which are now invalid but
still block our view of the real bug situation in Unity 7 (and Compiz, etc).

Talking with the team, we came up with a few options including:

a)  Automatically marking all bugs which have been open for more than 1
year as "Incomplete" and asking the user to try and recreate on the 15.10
daily, or 15.04 for that matter.  We would then filter these out, and if
not responded to in, say, 6 weeks, mark them as invalid and ask the
reporter to open a new bug if they need to, along with instructions on how
to do that properly.

b) Leave the situation as it is and just use filters and sorting to help
identify the best candidates for targeting in the 16.04 cycle.

c) Organising a global bug jam or hug day in association with the community
team and ask people pick a bug and try to reproduce it on 15.10.  If it
can't be reproduced, then tag it with $SOMETHING, and if it can be, then
tag with $SOMETHINGELSE.  We can then use the tags to do something like
option A, where we close the bugs which can't be reproduced and include
information on how to report a new bug.

Before we embark on any of these efforts though, I wanted to seek your
advice and guidance.  We have a *lot* of bugs which need to be tidied up
before we can make the most efficient use of our engineering time for
16.04.  I want to kick that process off as soon as possible.

I'd love to hear any suggestions you have for how we can get this rolling.

Cheers, Will

Ubuntu Desktop Engineering Manager

1: Too British?
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/can't+see+the+wood+for+the+trees
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