Better way to handle enhancement bugs

[Corey Burger]

Currently, wishlist is a level of Importance. This is kind of broken, as enhancements can fall under all importance levels.

A new idea would therefor add a magic word to the bug, labelling it as a wishlist.

What this would allow is sorting of enhancement bugs into priority, exactly like any other bug.

It would also allow the bug triager/developer to not see the enhancement bugs (I suggest this be the default) or list them at the end, in order of their priority.

[Corey Burger (corey.burger)]

Also, this should have a seperate interface, to hide all the things that only pertain to an actual bug report.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Matthew, do you have an opinion here? I agree that modeling enhancements can be better.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I think the data model is already too complicated; for example, I don't see why Severity is a separate field from Priority, when it isn't in other bug trackers. Similarly, to have Bug/Wishlist separate from Severity would be technically correct, but I don't think it's worth (a) the clutter and (b) pointless arguments about whether something (e.g. "X doesn't support alpha transparency properly", "Y takes a long time but doesn't show a progress window") is most appropriately classified as a bug or an enhancement. It's not going to help maintainers keep track of what they should do next; only Priority is going to do that.

[Stuart Bishop (stub)]

I think Malone should focus of handling bugs, and feature requests, wishlists etc. are not bugs. Instead of shoehorning them into the bug tracker these should be other systems in Launchpad (possibly a generic Issue Tracker).

Malone has a lot of complexity, and almost all of it is inappropriate to wishlists (CVE references, infestations, upstream and disto level bugs, audit trails, possibly the privacy and vendorsec systems, bug tasks). The goals are also different between the bug tracker and any system that needs to capture wishlists - in particular, it needs to be approachable by less technical users and requires tighter integration with the bounty system.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Offtopic, but Matthew said:

  I don't see why Severity is a separate field from Priority, when it isn't in other bug
  trackers.

but they /are/ separate in other trackers, including Bugzilla. Severity is something the reporter is generally going to assess (though he may not classify it correctly) -- how much he is affected by the problem. Priority is something /only/ the developer team can answer, given they are the ones putting effort into fixing the issue.

[Brad Bollenbach (bradb)]

In response to what Stuart said, bugs also have a *lot* in common with enhancements:

  1. duplicates.

  2. bounties.

  3. time estimates, deadlines, scheduling, milestones, etc.

  4. dependencies.

  5. assignee, priority, discussion, external web links, etc.

  6. keywords.

And various other obvious overlapping ideas.

In many ways, I think the "todo" application we've talked about developing could be considered like another kind of "view" on Malone, in addition to introducing its own new kind of object type into the system: the feature request.

I feel it would be interesting to have a jam session with the user community to figure out exactly what real human beings want to do with a system like this after 1.0 is rolled out (a BoF at the next super sprint would be excellent.)

[Corey Burger (corey.burger)]

I also don't see the point of having them seperate either. I have been racking my brains, looking for a use case where they should not be almost equal or equal, but I can't find one.

Can someone point me at a bug in a bugzilla/bug tracker somewhere that has Priority radically different from Severity?

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Corey, this bug isn't discussing severity versus priority. It's discussing indicating that a bug is an enhancement.

There are many sites that use separate severities and priorities (and read my definition carefully to understand why they are completely different concepts, though they may be misused if you are not familiar with the QA process). Async's Bugzilla is an example: http://bugs.async.com.br/

I should point out that priority is a lot more important (and directly useful) than severity.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Reported bug 886 on Severity and Priority being redundant.

[Brad Bollenbach (bradb)]

kiko, can we note this as a topic to discuss in Brazil, if it hasn't already been added as one?

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I think bug tags satisfy this - certainly lp itself uses the 'feature' tag to track that. Marking fix released as such, and if its not actually so please reopen it. Thanks!