Openmoko Bugtracker

Mike Montour mail at mmontour.net
Mon Aug 11 19:24:53 CEST 2008


On 11-Aug-08, at 9:16 AM, Holger Freyther wrote:

> Hey,
>
> the signal noise ratio of the bugtracker is in a state that I'm  
> close to
> ignoring it completely.
>
> It can not be that:
> 	- People say +1 and me too. It is not a popularity contest

The first "me too" might be useful, confirming that the issue is real  
and not just something that the original reporter was doing wrong.

As for the "popularity contest", Bugzilla has a "voting" capability  
that allows users to indicate the bugs that are most important from  
their perspective. I don't know if Trac has anything similar.

> 	- People playing with components, milestones, severity...

It would help to have reporting guidelines on the front page of http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/ 
   to tell users what the policy is. For example I recently re-opened  
#676 and I changed its severity from High to Normal. I don't know if  
that was the right thing to do, or if I should have left the severity  
field as-is.

Is it possible to configure Trac so that only certain people (OM  
employees) can edit the components/milestones/severity fields?

> 	- Hijacking bug reports. How and when should such a hijacked bug be  
> closed?

I would say to un-"hijack" it by creating a second report, linking the  
bugs to each other, and updating the description to make it clear that  
the original bug was only for a specific aspect of the problem. Then  
leave the original bug open until its specific problem has been  
resolved.

> 	- Not checking for duplicates before posting their bug.

Another item to add to the front-page reporting guidelines

How about adding a "recently closed as duplicate" filter to the list  
of available reports at http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/report/ , and  
instructing users to look at that before reporting any new issues?  
That would at least catch the case of users submitting multiple  
reports for recent bugs, although it doesn't help when someone re- 
discovers a months-old bug.

> If things continue that way I'm _forced_ to ask our engineers to not  
> waste
> their time with the bugtracker.

If you do that, please at least hire somebody (or recruit a community  
volunteer) to go through the bugtracker on a regular basis and add  
some special tag to the items that should be looked at by the engineers.





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