[teampractices] Scrum-y tools based on BZ (was Re: Scrumbu.gs)

[Rob Lanphier]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Matthew Flaschen
<mflaschen at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> I don't think we should get into weird substitutions just because people
> are edit warring.
>
> The active maintainers/team (whether they be volunteer or WMF) should have
> the final say on prioritization and which bugs are open.
>
> Lowest is not the same as WONTFIX.  'Lowest' priority means it should be
> fixed eventually, but there's a huge list of things to fix before it.
> WONTFIX means it's incorrect to change it (e.g. doing this change would
> make the user experience worse).
>

It looks like I'm the contrarian here.  This seems like one of those
inclusionist/deletionist battles that each side is going to have a tough
time understanding the others' point of view.

"WONTFIX" is often used to mean "maybe this should be fixed eventually, or
maybe it should never be fixed, but it probably doesn't matter because
we'll never get around to it".  It seems perfectly rational for the person
dealing with the backlog to look at a mountain of issues and say "can we
just be honest and say we won't fix the things we probably will never get
around to fixing?"

However, look at it from the reporters perspective.  Some reader or editor
discovers a problem, which they live with until it irritates them to the
point that they decide to figure out how to fix it.  They may have told
someone (maybe on Village Pump, or maybe some other forum) about the bug,
and were told "you should file a bug!", to which they say "how do I do
that?".  They then go through the arduous process of figuring out what that
means to file a bug, register yet another account, and figure out what the
20 gazillion form fields mean in our bug tracker.   Yay....looks like it
stuck.  Now what?  Wait, then wait, then wait some more, then someone
finally comes along and marks it "RESOLVED->WONTFIX" in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

It would take an awful lot of empathy for that person to understand where
we are coming from.  Chances are, their reaction will be "well, that will
teach me to ever do that again", and then poof, they're gone.  I don't
think it's much of a stretch to apply our lessons about Wikipedia editor
behavior to our bug tracker.  We should be very careful to come up with
processes that don't unintentionally turn away bug reporters.

I prefer setting things to "lowest" and then making a practice of querying
around it.  In my experience, 90% of the bugs that bug janitors want to set
to "WONTFIX" are really actually lowest priority by Matt's description.
 Admittedly, the difference between "WONTFIX" and "Lowest" priority may be
negligible from a reporter retention perspective, but I think a very low
priority still provides hope that one day, someone will fix it, whereas
there's a certain finality to "WONTFIX" that seems especially offputting.

Rob
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