some suggestions regarding bug triage and UNCONFIRMED reports.

[Lex Hider]

This was initially sent as a response to the recent email of the minutes from 
ubuntu's BugSquad's 1st meeting.
I was told that this list is a more appropriate place to post it.

On Tuesday 28 March 2006 21:42, Daniel Holbach wrote:
> Hello everybody,
<snip>
>ensure that this process becomes more fluent.
>
> [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Teams
>
> Fabio identified the areas of work as following: 'new incoming bugs',
> 'bug triaging (UNCO & unassigned)' and 'old bug junk'. We decided to
> have 'themed' Hug Days meaning that we concentrate on something else
> every two two weeks. (Watch out for the next announce for HugDay on
> Friday!)
>

Apologies if some of things have been implemented, but I still have troubles 
getting acquainted with launchpad.

I think a few reports available as links on launchpad would be really handy. 
check out gnome and kde bugzillas for some ideas.

Here are just a few ideas of the top of my head.

In dealing with the UNCONFIRMED bug issue, if you look at most OSS bugzillas, 
it is scary how many bugs are just sitting there that have been either: not 
looked (or at least as far as the reporter knows noone has looked at it), or 
has been confirmed by a developers comment but not set to NEW.

check out this bug for an interesting example:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84953#c4

Perhaps something like products with most UNCONFIRMED bugs:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=reports.html

I think a really useful one would be a link to all bug reports for packages in 
"main" (i.e. not uni/multiverse), which are UNCONFIRMED. This would have 2 
useful effects:

1) easy place for newbie triages to get started.
2) the number from this search (showing 1-25 of 1255 for example) is a useful 
metric and we could perhaps set some short term targets (OK let's this number 
below XXX).

Also, something like:
http://bugs.kde.org/weekly-bug-summary.cgi
would also be good.
Some useful things you can see from this page:
* what's the net change for number of bugs in package
* number of bugs
* Most importantly, is the top 20 bug resolves in last 7 days. At various 
times where I have been involved in KDE bug triaging, I have got a real kick 
out of being number one on that list. And I have done that only through 
closing duplicates and obsolete bugs without writing code.
So it could be a nice little competitive thing for triagers to get involved 
with, and perhaps we could regularly publicise the top bug closers not on the 
ubuntu payroll

just my 2c.

Peace,

Lex.