It's been a week since I asked for your comments on the plan for triage, thank you.
I'm going reply to some general comments on the plan, and outline next steps. Ekt and others said that up to now, individual teams have owned how they triage and prioritized bugs. Mozilla has made commitments to how we are going to follow up with people filing bugs. Thus we need consistent decisions across all the components that go into Firefox about bugs that we can share back to non-Mozillans on bugs they file, so that we can get them to contribute more high-quality bugs, and participate in other efforts in support of the project and the Open Web. I'm aware I'm asking teams with existing process to make a change, but it's for a global gain. Several people pointed out all the fields in Bugzilla that have and could be used to manage priorities, such as priority and rank. But we don't use the priority field consistently across the project. I've asked for teams to document how they use Priority, https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugmasters/Projects/Folk_Knowledge/Priority_Field, and you'll see how that varies. When I checked how the Priority field was used in Firefox-related components, that distribution was: --- 460,362 P1 14,304 P2 15,971 P3 37,933 P4 4,204 P5 2,913 The bulk of bugs in Firefox-related components are P3, most likely because we have a bug filing form that defaults to P3 and that needs to be fixed if it's still in use. Having to make what seemed like snap-decisions on bugs was also a point of concern, but that's something the proposal had a work around for, using needinfo? to defer a triage decision on a bug until enough questions were answered. And since we made a commitment to make decisions on bugs, we need back pressure on untriaged bugs. But from what I read, y'all are amenable to standardizing the priority flag's use in Triage. Doing that would create a discontinuity in historical data, but that's not an insurmountable problem, and we can document that breakage for researchers using historical data. So next step is a second proposal, simplified, using Priority to represent triage decisions. In addition, I'll want to remove several fields which are not useful, or superfluous from the bug entry wizards. Priority is a field that should be set by people triaging bugs, not entering them. We have a keyword vocabulary which is more expressive than severity. And our bug entry forms don't show the version affected, or the STR (steps to reproduce) flags which means it's an extra edit to get the information relman needs into a bug. Thank you again for your time and consideration as we make Bugzilla and Firefox better for everyone. -- Emma Humphries On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 1:07 PM, Emma Humphries <e...@mozilla.com> wrote: > tl;dr > > In Quarter Two I'm implementing the work we’ve been doing to improve > triage, make actionable decisions on new bugs, and prevent us from shipping > regressions in Firefox. > > Today I’m asking for feedback on the plan which is posted at: > > > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FFrtS0u6gNBE1mxsGJA9JLseJ_U6tW-1NJvHMq551ko > > Allowing bugs to sit around without a decision on what we will do about > them sends the wrong message to Mozillans about how we treat bugs, how we > value their involvement, and reduces quality. > > The Firefox quality team (myself, Mike Hoye, Ryan VanderMeulen, Mark Cote, > and Benjamin Smedberg) want to make better assertions about the quality of > our releases by giving you tools to make clear decisions about which bugs > must be fixed for each release (urgent) and actively tracking those bugs. > What We Learned From The Pilot Program > > During the past 6 weeks, we have prototyped and tested a triage process > with the DOM, Hello, and Developer Tools teams. > > Andrew Overholt, who participated in the pilot for the DOM team, said, “A > consistent bug triage process can help us spread the load of watching > incoming bugs and help avoid issues falling through the cracks." > > During the pilot, the DOM team uncovered critical bugs quickly so that > people could be assigned to them. > > The pilot groups also found that the triage process needs to be fast and > have tooling to make going through bugs fast. It’s easy to fall behind on > triage for a component, but if you stay up to date it will take no more > than 15 minutes a day. > > You can find the bugs we triaged during the pilot by looking for > whiteboard tags containing ‘btpp-’. > > It is also important to have consistent, shared definitions for regression > across components so triagers do not waste effort on mis-labeled bugs. > Comments? > > I am posting this plan now for comment over the next week. I intend to > finalize the triage plan for implementation by Tuesday, April 5th. Feedback > and questions are welcome on the document, privately via email or IRC > (where I’m emceeaich) or on the bugmast...@mozilla.org mailing list. > Timeline > > January: finish finding component responsible parties > > February: pilot review of NEW bugs with four groups of components, draft > new process > > Now: comment period for new process, finalize process > > Q2: implement new process across all components involved in shipping > Firefox > Q3: all newly triaged bugs following the new process > > -- Emma Humphries, Bugmaster > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
