Document calculation of bug heat

[Martin Pool]

It would be useful to understand why a bug has the heat it has (eg in bug 544794). There was some discussion before of showing the sum in a tooltip.

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

I'm not sure that showing the sum in the tooltip is the best way to go, since it would take up quite a bit of room. Maybe having a link to a wiki page explaining bug heat would be a better way to go.

[Eleanor Berger (intellectronica)]

I'm not sure this is something we should do. My feeling is that heat should be opaque. If the heat values users get don't make sense to them, then we should refine the way heat is calculated. If we add an explanation of how heat is calculated it will probably confuse users more than help them. Instead, we can provide an API script that gets this information for users who are especially curious.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I see there is https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/BugHeat and https://dev.launchpad.net/Bugs/BugHeat#Algorithm but it's a bit noncommittal about what approach is actually implemented. If it describes the real algorithm and all the inputs to it are visible that's probably enough.

In the case described in bug 544794, the actual heat of the bug doesn't match the algorithm described there, therefore I want to know how it's calculated.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

I think we'll do a good help page that accurately describes what we're doing for this rather than a calculation in the tooltip unless anyone has strong objections. We should also make this help page easily discoverable. I'll enlist Matt R.'s help with this.

Cheers,
deryck

[Matthew Revell (matthew.revell)]

Following a conversation with Deryck, here's how I'm going to tackle this bug:

The heat flame icons will be linked (with no underline or highlight on mouseover) to a help pop-up that explains, in detail, how Launchpad calculates bug heat.

I'll describe the modified bug heat algorithm that is due to go live with 10.04.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

See comment 13 on bug 557432 for an explanation of coming modifications to bug heat.

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/malone/+bug/557432/comments/13

[Ursula Junque (ursinha)]

Fixed in stable r10796 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/10796>

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Just a note that the documentation has landed on edge but the updated version of heat calculation is on staging, so the help popup doesn't match the way heat is calculated on edge. Once we have the 10.04 rollout next Tuesday, the two will be in sync.