[Libreoffice-qa] Bug Triage best practice: Change or not change assignee?

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Bjoern Michaelsen schrieb:

> Assignee is and has always been the guy who "owns" the bug.


Hi Björn,

That's something to what I might agree. But when I ask John Doe to 
contribute some more information, I (QA) remain "owner". But that are 
quibbles.

 > This is how ~every other open source project manages ...
Can you provide evidence?

I contributed to Mozilla, OOo, Wikipedia, Libreoffice and casual other 
projects, I never saw that as an established proceeding.

I did a query in bugzilla.mozilla.org over the last 60 days, in the 
15000 Bugs I saw 3000 where Reporter and Assignee are identical, in a 10 
items sample I only saw cases like 
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745686> where the reporter 
seems to be the one who will do the fix himselv (at least the comments 
look as if). I did not see something like a NEEDINFO comment in my sample.

Please contribute evidence for your statements!

And even our developers and other experienced TDF members until now did 
not proceed the way you suggest, as my queries from my last mail show.

Of course, that means nothing, may be we can improve proceeding, so my 
simple question is: What is the provable "real" benefit for the workflow 
we get of putting reporter into "Assigned to" together with instead of 
not doing so, and what are the disadvantages of that proceeding.

For my personal workflow I do not see any benefit.

But I see disadvantages:
a) That makes the "Assigned To" field useless for many queries, in lots 
of bugs it contains names nobody knows. I often use default assignee in 
queries, with the new proceeding I will have to add rules related to 
NEEDINFO status. Currently I do not remember a query where there should 
that not be done easily, but you never know.

b) Bugzilla help might worry reporter. "The person in charge of 
resolving the bug", does that mean he will have to pay a fine if he does 
not "resolve the bug?" ;-)

c) If a developer Assignee needs additional info, should he reassign the 
Bug to the reporter, so that we will have to check the history who might 
be "really" fixing the bug?

d) Requires additional rules for dashboard handling, we should "keep it 
simple". The less we use the dashboard, the less we have to write rules, 
answer questions, correct operating errors, ... .

Everything we change should have apparent benefit.

Without clear approval other key players for your suggestion and 
conclusive evidence of benefits I disagree with your suggestions.

Best regards

Rainer


Hyperlinks:
[1] 
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?chfieldto=Now;chfield=[Bug%20creation];query_format=advanced;chfieldfrom=-60d>