Following up on yesterday's email: I put together a draft second proposal
and shopped it around some, and now I want to bring that back into the main
discussion.

The bullet point version of this is:

* Add a binary field that components can use, TRIAGED (Y/N, T/F, +,-)
* In the case of Firefox related components, have a consistent definition
of P1-P5 and make sure that triaged bugs have a Priority assigned

This has a couple of implications:

This means I have to have a plan in place for dealing with Priority going
from ad-hoc to one set of meanings for bugs in Firefox components.

If any of you have worked with longitudinal social sciences data sets, this
is a common thing. Values for fields change over time, and researcher
consult documentation so that code consuming the data would work with the
discontinuities. Some of this can be handled through bugzilla UI, so that
components using the TRIAGED flag would display the description
corresponding to P1-P5 and other components would not.

We also need to go through all the existing whiteboard, keywords, and
custom flags we are using for e10s and other projects that are being used
to indicate importance.

I'd like to finish up feedback on by the end of the working day Thursday
the 6th (PST.)

Then we'll get to work on a solid specification for the work so we can
start implementation sometime in Q2.

Thanks.

-- Emma

On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 5:27 PM, Emma Humphries <e...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>
>
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