[Development] Priority field in Jira

[Mitch Curtis]

Hi.

I'm curious about what the reasons were for allowing (non-approver) reporters of bugs to set the priority field in Jira.

In my experience this often results in priorities being assigned that don't follow our conventions [1] on what constitutes a certain priority, but instead a priority that reflects how important the bug is to the reporter.

That's not to say that everyone who works on Qt has the same idea about priority, as there is always some small variation. However, when a reporter changes priority, it's almost always above what most Qt developers would set. This doesn't happen too often from the areas of Qt that I get Jira notifications for, but I also don't see the point in allowing it in the first place (and welcome any small decreases in the amount of Jira notifications), so I'm hoping someone can explain.

The only information I've found so far is from this [2] email from 2013:

    - Who can prioritize bugs?
       - whoever ask
       - we will create a special group in jira
       - approvers should be in the group by default
      Rationale: We do not have man power and we need help. We do not expect 
    anyone to destroy our precious bugs reports or play "ping pong" with a 
    priority.

For some context and for those who don't know: within the company, we now have weekly bug triaging where a team of two people prioritise all unprioritised bugs. So new reports rarely go more than a few days without having a priority set. We've been doing this for a few years (?) now and it works quite well.

Cheers.

[1] https://bugreports.qt.io/secure/ShowConstantsHelp.jspa?decorator=popup#PriorityLevels
[2] https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2013-July/011874.html