[Development] Suggestion for change on how blockers are marked in Jira

[Eskil A. Blomfeldt]

Hi!

We've had a few informal discussions locally about the current process 
of manually adding bugs to a meta-task in order for them to be 
considered blockers for a particular release.

Wouldn't it be more practical if this was baked into the information you 
register on the bug itself, so that it can easily be added to filters 
and so that you don't have to search for the task to let the release 
team know about it?

Our suggestion is: Instead of the meta-task, we use the "Fix version" 
field. The combination of "Status: Closed" and "Fix version" is 
currently used to indicate the first version containing a particular 
fix. "Status: Open" and "Fix version", however, has a very loose 
definition at best. Since we're doing time-based releases, it gives a 
promise it might not be able to keep, so the preference has been to 
leave the field unset until the report is closed.

So we could define it like this: If a bug report is open and has "Fix 
version: Qt X.Y", then it will be considered a blocker for Qt X.Y. The 
release team will maintain this the same way they maintain the 
meta-task, and will override it if they disagree that it should be a 
blocker.

When the report is closed, the "Fix version/s" field is set to the 
versions that actually contain the fix as before.

-- Eskil