On Nov 27, 2012, at 2:36 AM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 26 November 2012 17:25, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Timeframes seem like a pretty good proxy for priority. If something is "highest" priority, and yet is not on track to be completed for several months, then.....wait, what?
I disagree. In 1962, NASA's "highest" (most-high?) priority was to put a human on the Moon; that doesn't mean they achieved it before 1969. High priority and soonness-to-be-done are orthogonal. More prosaically, VE's most-high priority task in July was to deploy a test version of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia in December; it's now only a few weeks away, but for the past five months it's remained our most-high priority, whilst we've worked on things to support that.
I agree with Rob, there is a strong correlation between priority and milestone. However, I don't believe they are linked enough to be able to merge them.
Last year I proposed to replace Priority, Severity and Milestone with just Milestones. However I now believe that Priority and Timeframe (milestone) should stay separate.
On Nov 27, 2012, at 2:25 AM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Your definitions of priority strike me as redefining the field as a "severity" field, which makes it redundant and also not terribly useful as a prioritization tool.
It seems Severity (or Priority) is redundant in practice. Severity may be useful for statistical purposes afterwards, but given that it is rarely useful for anything other than "enhancement", we might as well drop it and just have a tag for "enhancement" (like for "regression").
Highest priority is the next primary feature in a component and/or a critical bug that needs fixing. Both are very important, but one is long-term the other short-term (as James demonstrates well with the NASA example).
On Tue, 2012-11-20 at 02:33 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote:
== Proposal ==
Proposing the following definitions for Priority:
- highest: Needs to be fixed as soon as possible, a week at the
most. A human assignee should be set in the "Assigned to" field.
I'd recommend we also require a Milestone to be set for "Highest" priority tickets.
That way it is clear to both the assigned developer and the community what the expectations are.
-- Krinkle