[Libreoffice-qa] Stagnant NEEDINFO bugs

[Rainer Bielefeld]

Joel Madero schrieb:

Hi Joel,

thank you for opening this discussion with your thoughts and suggestions.

To avoid misunderstandings: my critics at current plans does not mean 
that I do not want any automated mass cleanups. I would appreciate to 
get rid of lots of hopeless reports with few "costs".

Although I believe we could solve some part of the problem if we would 
invest the time discussing here into bug reviews, it might be useful to 
do some very careful preparation, so that in future such mass closes can 
be done effectively and with few preparation, because the work already 
has been done here.

Some thoughts (I'm still sorting and prioritizing)

I) Such an action should avoid collateral damages as effective as 
possible. A promising approach might be to find an effective query with 
good accuracy for hopeless Bug reports where we can expect that there 
will be no useful reaction from reporter, AND where we can be sure that 
the NEEDINFO is appropriate and not only caused by laziness of reviewer 
At least I can say for me that sometimes I am interested and tough and I 
find a real bug even with a very rare report. And sometimes I try to get 
a better bug description because I want to  save some work. I will not 
forget these Bugs, they are in my hold-file, but if I saw a low 
priority, it might take a year or so until I get back to the bug. And 
this might cause unnecessary work for other reviewers, may be hundreds 
invest half a minute, see that someone is involved, leave again, and so 
we loose some hors every year in such 1 bug.

II) Such a mass close should really terminate any action on a closed bug 
(except reporter redelivers useful info). The last mass close in August 
2012 also closed lots of appropriate enhancement requests. We should 
avoid such a mistake in future.

III) I prefer to close Bugs immediately with a very polite text 
encouraging the reporter to reopen the bug if he can contribute more 
detailed and precise due to 
<http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugReport>. I am pretty sure that 
those who would have improved their bug description after a "first 
strike" will understand our reasons and simply reopen the Bug with 
better info. And for the other ones the first and second strike would be 
wasted energy.

IV) We need a very polite and encouraging text for first strike bug 
closing.

V) Remaining concerns
We can be as careful as possible, it's inevitable that we will close 
some bugs reported from real experts with appropriate info, but only the 
bad luck that the of us who reviewed was expert for something else. That 
makes us looking like idiots.


My method of resolution:
I will start with a suggestion for a query with reasoning why I believe 
that that should be done that way soon, and then we can integrate more 
proposals for optimization step by step.

We will see to where that leads, and the rating how nearby the optimum 
that is at least for me is decisive what of Joels suggesteions might be 
the best.

CU

Rainer