"Incomplete" status difficult to understand
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Launchpad itself |
Triaged
|
Low
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
A common interaction in a Launchpad bug, at least against Ubuntu, goes something like:
1. Bug reporter reports bug
2. Triager has additional questions about bug, sets status to Incomplete
3. Bug reporter or third party at least attempts an answer to the question
4. Bug report remains in Incomplete status and the clock starts counting down to automatic closing of the bug, together with messages to the bug reporter reminding them that they are meant to provide additional information.
It seems that the more desirable interaction is that at Step 3 the bug is reset to 'New' or another status aside from 'Incomplete', but some triagers and maintainers do not habitually do this and not all bug reporters either know to do so and some who do might consider this overly aggressive: they aren't a triager or someone who knows anything, they are just a person with a bug.
There is often a problem with Step 2 as well, in that the triager does not always directly state "I need X to act further on this bug", it can be phrased more along the lines of "X would be nice" or "I wonder if X was the case?" along with an Incomplete status, which leaves the required action at Step 3 unclear and the bug reporter less confident in reversing the Incomplete status when commenting further.
I suggest that the following be considered:
1. that the Incomplete status have an extra field specifying exactly which information is required;
2. that when a comment is made on an Incomplete bug, the person who set the status be notified (in email?) that they should consider resetting the bug; and/or
2. that further comments on an Incomplete bug be greeted with some kind of prompt about whether the bug should remain in the Incomplete state: "eg, this bug is marked Incomplete because there are outstanding questions about it in comment #X, have you answered these questions?"
A simpler solution would be to change any Incomplete status to New whenever the reporter comments in a bug report. That would require no extra e-mail notifications and no extra prompts, and it would make Launchpad simpler than it is now because it would abolish the "Incomplete (with response)" pseudo-status.