Launchpad bug workflow change

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Scott Kitterman wrote:
>>>
>>> I have no idea.  I think here you are taking them away for no good reason
>>> that I have seen.
>>>       
>> What has beene taken away? The ability for anyone with an email address
>> to set bugs to In progress and similar. We have also added 3 new bug
>> states which I think will be very useful.
>>     
>
> Yes.  So now anyone who is not in -dev or -qa that wants to work on a bug will 
> need to bother someone else to set the status or not set it and risk 
> duplication of effort (or give up on the bureaucracy and go home).  Is there 
> evidence that this solves an actual problem?
>   

There are currently a range of related problems as I see it:

 * People are setting a bug to confirmed when they also see it (a 'me 
too') while we at the same time use this state to imply that a bug 
report has all the required information.

 * Bugs are staying in the Unconfirmed or Need Info states too long. 
Sometimes important bugs to not reach the developer radar for this 
reason and stable releases are put out with bad breakage. I think more 
structure can help clear the Unconfirmed swamp.

 * Several people look at the same bug independently without that being 
recorded in a useful way, wasting effort. A more fine grained status 
system will let more people make at least some change to it, moving it 
forward.

 * Status settings mean different things to different teams and in 
different contexts. This makes starting to triage much more confusing.

 * We have no good mechanism (other than IRC and the bugsquad list) or 
policy for giving feedback to those doing triage and that is key to 
improving skills. Buglog is intended to help with that, but a state 
field that encourages feedback through the triage process may be more 
effective.


I'm not claiming that tomorrow's change will fix all these complex 
problems but I'm hoping it will help.

If we need to give wider permissions to more people then I'm sure we can 
do that, both for triaging and fixing, either through ubuntu-qa or other 
teams that we can set up. Even an open team with thousands of members 
might be better than just anyone with a launchpad account. The 
registration page for that team could refer to triaging guidelines.

Launchpad does have a certain feature set, and that will gradually 
change with input from the user base (many projects, not just Ubuntu). 
But how the Ubuntu project decides to use those tools will be decided by 
us, through discussions like this and the CC and TB if needed. We can 
use the team structure or social mechanisms to give the access we want 
to various groups.

Henrik