>From: Volker Hilsheimer <[email protected]>
> 
> The priority field changes it’s meaning during the lifetime of the bug report:
> 
> * in the beginning, it tells us how important it is for the reporter of the 
> bug. This is useful.

This is news to me; I've not once heard of it being used this way. I also 
question the usefulness of a field that has two meanings over time. Why not 
have two fields with distinct meanings that can't be confused and that result 
in no extra work? However little that work may be, it's still unnecessary. This 
solution is even more "inclusive" [1], as well.

I would argue that a good bug report should explain what the consequences of a 
bug are and how this affects the user's application. I have asked for this 
exact information in several instances in the past and it greatly helped me 
come up with a suitable priority. If this information is not initially present 
in the report, this question has to be asked eventually anyway. When you ask 
what the consequences of a bug are and how it affects the end user, you can 
quite easily come up with an objective assessment of the priority of that bug, 
and of course any +1 comments, votes and watchers can naturally increase that 
priority over time to some extent.

> * after triaging (which we do regularly, at least in The Qt Company), it 
> tells us how important it is for the Qt Company (and perhaps the Qt 
> community/project at large)

But if the initial priority as reported by the customer is important, then 
you've just lost it by overriding during triage (not many people are going to 
check the "All" tab to see the history). This might solve the issue of being 
"inclusive", but then becomes a lack of transparency.

> Anything that is still a P0 after triaging should be treated as such: 
> unplanned work that needs to be fixed so urgently that it preempts any 
> planned work.
> 
> For everything else: if you are in a team that plans their work weeks based 
> on JIRA tickets, then the priority of a ticket is one piece of information 
> for that planning process.
> 
> Not allowing reporters to set priority removes a piece of information, but 
> shouldn’t change anything else, so I’m not convinced that we should limit 
> things by default.

Most reports are created with priorities left as unevaluated, so by now we 
should be used to coming to a conclusion about the priority without an initial 
assessment from the reporter. This is something I think the bug triaging duties 
are great for getting better at, and I think pretty much everyone in the 
company does a good job at assessing priorities.

> If reporters consistently abuse their privilege, in spite of dialogue and 
> feedback, then we might need to find more effective ways to deal with those 
> particular reporters.

To be clear: I've probably ever only had a ping-pong issue once, so I'm not 
claiming that that is a problem. I'm just questioning whether our process could 
be more efficient.

[1] Though if you look another popular open source project with a public bug 
tracker with lots of bugs, you'll see that reporters have even less freedom in 
managing a report and somehow it works fine: 
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues
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