Tracker Status

[Ocean West]

Some suggestions for "status" in the tracker. 

• Pending
• In Review
• Transferred to Development
• Not a Bug
• Need more info
• Duplicate
• Cannot reproduce
• Design Limitation
• Fixed
• Closed

[Charles]

Pending = Pending
In Review = Pending
Transferred to Development = Pending
Not a Bug = Closed
Need more info = Closed
Duplicate = Closed
Cannot reproduce = Closed
Design Limitation = Closed
Fixed = Fixed
Closed = Closed

 

All those other statuses do not tell you what you really want to know: is it fixed or not? Either way you have to read the bug to know what's up.

[Ilya Hoilik]

I agree, but I think Awaiting Feedback status is really needed. I'm not sure, but I think Closed status is only for closed bugs that do not need any addition information. And Awaiting Feedback status means that this error requires you attention when new comment was added. But you know better 

[Charles]

We don't treat it any differently internally. If you reply to a bug report - regardless of status - we will read it. We will set it back to pending if you provide more information. Be it closed/awaiting feedback/looking for love/not a bug/whatever we still read them all.

(Overly-complex bug reporting systems for no useful reason is a big pet peeve of mine.)

[Ocean West]

Thanks for the info Charles - Yea this was based on another system that I report bugs too - however in retrospect, that is more of a black hole and other peers cannot see the report unless they go out of their way.

Charles, what is your preference regarding reports - would you rather have people report the same bug multiple times, as separate posts or us to add to existing report.

[Charles]

There is really no need to report a bug multiple times if the original is still showing pending.

[Ocean West]

There is really no need to report a bug multiple times if the original is still showing pending.

​Translation = we should practice due diligence and search first for existing bugs and make comments.

Since this is an IPC Database and not the forums there is no Merge/Split functionality. 

[Shariq Ansari]

Pending = Pending
In Review = Pending
Transferred to Development = Pending
Not a Bug = Closed
Need more info = Closed
Duplicate = Closed
Cannot reproduce = Closed
Design Limitation = Closed
Fixed = Fixed
Closed = Closed

 

All those other statuses do not tell you what you really want to know: is it fixed or not? Either way you have to read the bug to know what's up.

​You have no interest whatsoever in being able to track how many bugs were closed because they were duplicate vs. cannot reproduce vs. design limitation?

Those seem like meaningful differentiators that you'd want metrics on... most other software developers do, if you look at bugzilla, JIRA, etc.

Your argument that the statuses "don't tell you what you really want to know" is irrelevant if it's still additional information that would be nice/helpful to track, isn't it?

You could either do a separate field entirely to track "Reason" (i.e. the reason why something has a status of closed), or the substatuses could simply be "Closed - Not a Bug", "Closed - Duplicate", "Closed - Cannot Reproduce" - either way, you're capturing additional information that should be helpful to the development of IPS4+, unless you're saying that IPS is significantly different from the thousands of large software projects that make good use of these codes...