Backtracing, Invalidated Bugs and Quality

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 16:06 +0200, Markus Hitter wrote:
> please stop this marking-as-invalid-mania.

+1.  It's a bad idea to hide problems, even ones that cannot be
replicated.

On the other hand I do think it's worthwhile to somehow mark bugs which
are not sufficiently documented as to be reproducible/fixable.  The
reality is, as Markus says, there are a LOT of bugs out there.  Should
we spend precious developer resources working (almost invariably
futilely) for hours to try to reproduce a bug like this, or should we
spend the same time fixing a bunch of bugs where we do have sufficient
information?  The answer is obvious.

So, if there is no suitable bug state existing already we need a new
state for these kinds of bugs.  We can call it "watching", or
"insufficient information", or "can not reproduce", or whatever.  But it
should not be "invalid"... or at least not have the current behavior of
invalid, where once the bug is marked that way it, and all dups of it,
drop off the edge of the world.

Also, it seems to me that if you tell someone their bug is "invalid"
that doesn't inspire them to come back with more information or send
more bugs in the future.  On the other hand, if you mark the bug as
"need help" or similar, then they know what they need to do next time.
It's more encouraging than discouraging.


My $0.02.