[teampractices] Bugzilla migration Re: Project management tools review: Regressions/tradeoffs; migration

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Luis Villa <lvilla at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I think the most important principle for a BTS is "it must be useful for
> the developers". All other principles are subordinate.


I really deeply agree with this.

A bug tracker is really just a fancy to-do list for software development.
The thing about to-do lists is that things which sit un-done on them for
years and years just fade in to the background, and the prevent a feeling
of momentum and "getting shit done". If we have thousands of stale unfixed
bugs, it's not a good thing to treat this like a precious tome of knowledge
that has to be preserved forever exactly how it is.

That said, I wasn't really calling for an automated clearing away of stale
bugs. Rather, I think with elbow grease and a little optimism about the
power of our community, we can import the bugs that really are priorities
in to Phabricator. This teaches how to use the tool in a trial by fire,
gets our staff/community to own the bug backlog for each component in a
deeper way that doesn't lean on a few dedicated individuals who live inside
Bugzilla 24/7, and it gets us a clean break with a nasty old tool that's
not very well-supported by us or upstream.

-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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