Backtracing, Invalidated Bugs and Quality

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:42:01 +0100 "Caroline Ford" 
<caroline.ford.work at googlemail.com> wrote:
>2008/8/20 Alexander Sack <asac at ubuntu.com>:
>
>> But there are also many crash reports where the retracers fail and we
>> dont have any testcase. You want those to stay open as well?
>
>But what do we do with these then? They are still bugs, and with some
>crashes we never seem to get a backtrace with symbols.
>
>Currently we just close them and hope they go away..

Personally, I think closing them after some period if similar crashes stop 
coming is reasonable.  For me I think the period should be rather long 
(like most of a development cycle) unless there is reason to think 
something's actually been fixed.

There are a wide range of styles project can using for managing their bug 
database.  I've worked on projects that never closed bugs that they 
couldn't tie to a specific fix.  I worked for another one that had a bug 
status called OTO for One Time Only.  This was treated as very close to 
closed, but was actively checked for dupes.  I recall another where the 
project manager routinely ordered bugs to be closed (because he'd told 
someone it was fixed) without reference to the state of the code base.  
That one did not end well.

I think we have veered to far in the direction of closing bugs.  It's 
almost as if someone, in homage to Emporer Joseph II in Amadeus said, 
"There are simply too many bugs".

I'd probably find it more useful if bug triagers invested more time in 
trying to reproduce bugs and get them to Triaged and less of finding ones 
they might close.

Scott K