Qt-contributors-summit-2013-QtCSBugDiscussion

Bug Management Discussion

Qt Contributors’ Summit 2013

Session Goal: Find out more about how to make Bug Management more efficient

• Gather suggestions, and make some decisions.

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Some topic suggestions for the Agenda

Goal for Bug triaging:

• Can/should we get the number of untriaged bugs down to ‘zero’?
• Verification steps: What are they?
• Triaging steps: What are they?
  • Verify that can reproduce as described
  • Verify that can reproduce on reported platform with latest version in /dev
  • Prioritize

• Who is responsible for what?
  • Maintainers should get their number of untriaged bugs down to zero once a week?
  • Can we have a qt-project wide “bugzy super tuesday”?
  • Can we allow more people to prioritise bugs?

• How can we get more people involved, and in which areas?
  • Will it help to get more people involved?

• Use of “fixed version”-field in Jira

• How to help people get involved:
  • Need How to use jira doc?
  • wiki: how to get started?

• How to make sure we fix the right bugs
  • P0 and P1s and beyond

Minutes from the session.

• We have untriaged bugs, we may not be able to triage them all, but we should keep it’s count as low as possible.
• We agreed on “triaging” definition. Triaging consist of:
  • checking if a bug report is sensible. It means the reported issue is not a result of a user mistake, use of undefined behavior etc.
  • checking if a bug report is not missing an important data, so it would be possible to reproduce it in future
  • setting a priority
  • optionally the bug report may be verified. It it is reproduced then it should be accept which means moved to open state

Rationale: It looks like the most common behavior of people triaging bugs.

• Who can prioritize bugs?
  • whoever ask
  • we will create a special group in jira
  • approvers should be in the group by default

Rationale: We do not have man power and we need help. We do not expect anyone to destroy our precious bugs reports or play “ping*pong” with a priority.

• What does it mean “fixed version” in bug report
  • we do not fill it until an issue is really fixed, which means merged
  • we do not want to use the field for estimation
  • we now that it can be filled automatically, it would be nice to implement that.

• Jira workflow was designed for much bigger team, that includes QA department, it should be simplify
  • We decided that “in progress” state means that someone started work on a bug or it have a fix which is not merged yet. Time statistics doesn’t show anything, anyway.
  • Resolved, Verified and Closed should be merged to a single state. Nobody is going through Resloved bugs to verify them.
  • It would be nice to have a transition from Open to Closed state