[Libreoffice-qa] ping to retest old bugs

[Tommy]

Hi QA guys,
I had this idea and I want to hear what you think about.

we currently have 799 UNCONFIRMED and 7793 NEW bugs.
I think that there should be a consistent number of those who did not  
receive any new comment in the last 6 months.

i.e.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61972  (UNCONFIRMED)
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30571 (NEW)

and I also thinks that among those who were last tested with older than 6  
month LibO versions (which usually means that a new branch has been  
released in the meantime) some have been fixed somehow...

it happens frequently to me to retest some of those old untouched bugs and  
see that the were reproducible in older branches available at that time  
(i.e. 4.1.x) but now fixed in 4.3.x or 4.4 master, so I label them as  
RESOLVED WORKSFORME and suggest the original reported to upgrade.

so my suggestion is to do a mass ping campaign with bugzilla QA  
administrators tool and send a message like:

"your bug report has shown no activity in the last 6 months. newer LibO  
releases with hundred of bugifixes and new features have been releases  
meanwhile, so please retest with current LibO release (4.3.2.2) and give  
feedback of the actual status of the bug. if bug is gone set status to  
RESOLVED WORKSFORME. if bug is still present leave status UNCHANGED and  
drop a new comment telling the LibO version where you retested and  
reproduce it"

we could decide to do the same thing with NEW and UNCONFIRMED BUGS  
untouched from more than 6 month (or maybe 1 year)

If they see the bug has gone they should mark as WORKSFORME
if bug persist they should drop a note and leave status UNCHANGED
if nobody answers we do nothing and leave status UNCHANGED

so basically this is intended to get rid of the many WORKSFORME bugs that  
surely exist but still have an UNOCONFIRMED or NEW status, just because  
nobody retested them in the meantime

see this example:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67040

I opened this one in july 2013, last comment was from january 2014 then I  
forgot about it...

after some time I stumbled upon it again and saw that it was fixed somehow  
during development of 4.3.x branch, so I marked this as WORKSFORME

please give your feedback about my idea.