On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 12:44 PM, Krinkle <krinklemail(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree. Defaulting new bugs to a low priority
doesn't seem very
friendly
to new users. They don't know (and shouldn't have to know) what the
bugmeister's organization is.
I thought about replying with a similar response, but then I realized
that if Mark stays on top of incoming bugs (which is his job), he'll
be able to bump bugs up to normal as they come in, which should
actually make those people good, and provide some automatic positive
reinforcement for filing important bugs. I suspect most people won't
even notice that the bug defaults to "low", and they'll be able to fix
it if they disagree. I suppose the best thing would be to have a
blank priority (or "triage" as OQ suggests), so that we could query
for the bugs that haven't been explicitly prioritized, but I don't
know if that's possible.
This isn't so narrowly focused on the bugmeister as it is starting to
pay attention to the priority field as a community. All priorities
should have a meaning for us. We can debate about what is "correct",
but here's what my thinking is:
1. "Highest" - this means a bug that someone is either working on
*right now*, or at least should be working on right now. No developer
should have more than one "highest" priority bug, and anything marked
"highest" priority shouldn't stay unassigned for more than a week.
2. "High" - this means that a bug is in the relatively-small pool of
bugs that will likely get bumped to "highest" priority. Bugs at this
priority should, at a minimum, be blockers for the next release of the
software.
3. "Normal" - these are bugs that really should get fixed for the
next release of the software. They aren't necessarily blockers, and
we may grit our teeth and have a release or two with this bug, but
there's no way we should go two releases with a "normal" priority bug.
4. "Low" - these are bugs that we won't actively manage. They may be
important to some people, and someone may get around to fixing the
problem, but no developer is committed to working on a fix
5. "Lowest" - these are bugs that pretty much everyone agrees aren't
terribly important (including the reporter).
I'm not wedded to these exact definitions, but I'm pretty wedded to
the idea that we should agree on something. I don't think we should
consider it "normal" to have bugs go for years without activity.
From a practical perspective, many more bugs than are
being marked as
"normal" are actually "normal" by this standard.
Most of the bugs in
our database are probably "low" priority in the sense that we just
can't get around to fixing all of them. I can see the argument for
making the most common case the default (though I share others
uneasiness with doing so).
Rob