[Development] [QA] Suggestion -- Bug Reports' Assignment

[Alan Alpert]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 5:43 AM, Jason McDonald <macadder1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 11:27 PM, Motyka Rafal <Rafal.Motyka at digia.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to express another suggestions for bug management:
>> - A newly opened bug report shouldn't be automatically assigned to anyone.
>> - Logged-in users should be able to assign bug reports to themselves.
>>
>> Assigned = 'someone works or is going to work on the item'
>> Unassigned = 'nobody works on the item'

I'm not fond of this distinction because it's not very practical. I
have plenty of low priority bugs assigned to me which I'm intending to
fix "sometime". Does this count as "someone is going to work on the
item"? Because it's certainly viable for someone else to take over if
they wanted it done sooner than "sometime", just as viable as an
unassigned bug. But there's the advantage that they know who to ask if
they have questions about the task.

I much prefer the distinction like Thiago suggested, where assignee is
a person "responsible" for the bug even if they aren't necessarily
going to ever find time to work on the item. At least then you have
someone to ask if you want to take it over but have questions.

>>
>> Please feel free to comment on this.
>> If there are no serious objections, this change will be introduced soon. The
>> impact of the change will be evaluated.
>
> I think that this is something that can be decided by each module maintainer.

I disagree, because JIRA is supposed to be a tool that allows the
different groups to work together. It's going to be confusing for even
dedicated triagers to follow a variety of conflicting rules, and it
certainly can't be asked of the bug reporters (who don't want to need
special training based on the component which they're bad at picking
anyways...). Even if the default assignee is "Unassigned" for some
modules, the meaning of assigned vs unassigned should be consistent
throughout the Qt project.

> Personally, I'm happy to have testlib bugs auto-assigned to me so that
> I get an email for each new bug to prompt me to go and triage it.  I
> prefer the email notification to having to poll Jira frequently.  The
> volume of new bug reports in testlib is low enough that this works
> well for me.  I also happen to be the default assignee of the Other
> component and getting those bugs auto-assigned to me prompts me via
> email to have a look and figure out which component the Other bugs
> really belong to.  Unless I mark something as In Progress, I'm happy
> for anybody else to take it off my hands by assigning it to
> themselves.
>
> On the other hand, I can see that maintainers with a larger throughout
> of Jira tasks might prefer to default to Unassigned and poll Jira for
> high-priority items.  Jira supports both options on a per-component
> basis, so we can be flexible.

Except that you need to triage the bugs *before* you can be confident
in the component or priority, so that approach doesn't work.

--
Alan Alpert