Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 4338
REMIND and LATER considered harmful
Last modified: 2012-03-18 00:34:56 UTC
To summarize: bugs that are marked 'REMIND' or 'LATER' are not in any way resolved; marking them as resolved is confusing, misleading, and leads to bad bug management practices. They should be removed, and any bugs in those states should be moved to milestones related to those states. A more detailed discussion, from bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 13534: [http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13534] "I think that we should endeavour to remove REMIND and LATER from Bugzilla. I believe that they achieve more harm than good. There are many disadvantages: (a) They can easily not appear as queries. After all, they are _unresolved_. (b) Effort to reopen, resulting in comments/activity which clutter the bug report. (c) They are usually set by Netscape employees and hence imply Netscape's agenda for what will go in. Mozilla, at least, is a open project, where anyone can contribute. So, what's the alternative? The obvious answer is, the milestone. Remind can already be handled by moving the bugs to a later milestone where they need to get reevaluated. Remind could even get turned into a bug flag (see bug #11155). For LATER, there needs to be an "No Target" milestone. This means that there is currently no plan for implementation, but it has been considered, and hence won't appear on groups' new bugs radar (ie having a blank milestone, which might be renamed to "To Be Considered"). This would require a little modification of queries by Netscape employees to exclude untargetted bug reports, but they generally know how to use Bugzilla. It is a lot more important that Bugzilla newbies can quickly find the issues that do not have a target date and they should help out on, and point (a) can prevent this. This, combined with the introduction of assigning to "nobody@mozilla.org", covers all the issues that I know of. Note that this works just as well for closed or in-house projects that use Bugzilla." To summarize: bugs that are marked 'REMIND' or 'LATER' are not in any way resolved; marking them as resolved is confusing, misleading, and leads to bad bug management practices. They should be removed, and any bugs in those states should be moved to milestones related to those states.
This makes sense. Louis?
Hi, this does make sense but it is really Michael Bemmer's call, as he is the main organizer of IssueZilla. It is possible that these characterizations are used by some projects more than others. But, for my money, I think that if we are to suggest modifications on the IZ template, then we should include this one. adding stefan to cc list. and changing to enhancement, not defect. Reassigning to Michael. Lowering priority. louis
Maybe somebody can enlighten me: what is all this discussion about Bugzilla and "Netscape employees" about? We're dealing with OpenOffice.org and IssueZilla here. Regarding the enhancement itself: yes, I agree, calling something that's just postponed "resolved" is not really correct. I'd vote for removing the stati "later" and "remind", too, and work with milestones instead. So I accept this issue, but see no high priority to get this implemented.
The mozilla/netscape discussion is cut and pasted discussion from bugzilla.mozilla.org; sorry if that was confusing. The issues that they face in their bugzilla are in many ways identical to the ones OOo face here, so I thought it might be of some use to see how they've dealt with it (given that they've now got several years of bugzilla experience and roughly 20 times as many filed bugs as you guys do.) [Whether or not 20 times more bugs is a sign of success or failure is debatable, I suppose ;) but they haven't gone insane yet... ;)
Reset QA Contact to new default
Old CEE Issue, so I will close it.