[Libreoffice-qa] Stagnant NEEDINFO bugs

[Joel Madero]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 6:59 AM, Petr Mladek <pmladek at suse.cz> wrote:

> On Sun, 2013-01-27 at 13:43 +0100, Rainer Bielefeld wrote:
> > 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
>

I think that this query does not exist. FDO has a lot of limitations,
finding out if a QA or reviewer was lazy in their change....our best guess
is if this was the case, the reporter would have reopened the bug and not
left it in NEEDNIFO for >6 months.


> > 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.
>

I understand what you're saying here but unfortunately there is nothing we
can do about other QA people who in the past have not put in due time to
think about if NEEDINFO is appropriate. Furthermore, I think that if it's a
"quick fix" that the reporter should just provide the information. While I
think that QA should take on the brunt of the work for triaging, we should
and do expect a certain level of dedication from the user who reported the
bug. If a user doesn't take 5 minutes to update their bug....whose fault is
that really?


>
> This is one thing that I am afraid of as well. We could close bugs that
> are somehow solvable but nobody has found time to do more investigation.
>

Agree with below remark about nothing being perfect.


> The question is how many bugs belong to this category. Someone pointed
> out that bugs that have been in NEEDINFO longer time are often dead
> ends.
>
> I think that we newer will be perfect. If a bug is staying around for a
> long time, it is not super cricical. If we close valid bug and nobody
> bother to reopen it, it is not supercritical as well. We have more bugs
> that we are able to fix, so we could use this as a natural filtering of
> the less important and thus very low priority bugs.
>
> I am sure that if a bug is important and we close it "by mistake",
> someone will reopen it. This activity will bring more attention to it
> and move it forward. It is not ideal but it has positive effects. What
> do you think?
>

+1, but I think that we should be be prepared for some vocal reporters who
get angry about being inconvenienced. Unfortunately if this is what it
takes to clean up FDO, I'm all for it.


Personally I think that 3-6 months range, one reminder and then 1-4 weeks
later closing the bug is best but this will result in double the mail which
I know some of the devs have already vocalized not being happy with. We
must find a way to mitigate this as one developer in particular said flatly
that we would piss off a lot of developers if they see hundreds of emails
in their mail account.


Best Regards,
Joel


-- 
*Joel Madero*
LibO QA Volunteer
jmadero.dev at gmail.com
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