Changes to the bugzilla workflow: 2 proposals

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2016, Luigi Toscano wrote:

> On Monday, 12 December 2016 10:22:37 CET Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > On Sun, 11 Dec 2016, Luigi Toscano wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I would like to propose two changes to the Bugzilla workflow for our
> > > instance on bugs.kde.org. The two proposals are totally independent from
> > > each other.
> > > 
> > > a) use the "needinfo" flag instead of the NEEDINFO status.
> > 
> > I wouldn't like that. I'm with Martin here -- NEEDINFO is an essential part
> > of my workflow, and I'm not interested in fine-grained asking info from one
> > particular person in the bug thread.
> 
> 
> If you want to filter the bugs with needinfo, you can still do it (see the 
> other answer on this thread), so this would not disrupt your queries.
> Even if you are not interested in more detailed needinfo, others could be. Wit 
> the targeted needinfo it is *possible* to define periodic reminder emails too.

What about the mails? I filter all my bugzilla mail into new, changed and needinfo
folder with pine. 

In any case, I don't see any improvements here -- not for my workflow. I guess
I can adapt, and I'm fine with having to do that, but it's not like there's 
anything useful for me in return.

> 
> 
> > > b) change back the initial state from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.
> > > 
> > > This was the default until Bugzilla 3. But Many of our developers don't
> > > really use the UNCONFIRMED->CONFIRMED transition and this confuses the
> > > users. Moreover, NEW is still the initial status on various bugzilla
> > > instances. I would introduce an ASSIGNED state so that developers that
> > > want to mark that they have acknowledged it and they are going to work on
> > > it can do it.
> > > 
> > > What do you think?
> > 
> > I'm fine with adding NEW, my workflow currently misses a stage between
> > UNCONFIRMED and CONFIRMED that means "I looked at the bug report, but
> > couldn't confirm, and I don't want to look at it again any time soon", so
> > going from NEW to UNCONFIRMED to CONFIRMED would be good for me. I don't
> > need an ASSIGNED stage, I don't even assign bugs these days; as soon as
> > someone starts to work on them, I make a phabricator task.
> 
> Would NEW + a keyword (Triaged, InitialTriage) work for this case?
> 

Not if you're talking about the keywords like in the top half of the screen,
those are horrible. if I can have NEW/UNTRIAGED, NEW/TRIAGED, NEW/CONFIRMED
like RESOLVED/WONTFIX or RESOLVED/FIXED, then that might work. But the
easiest flow would ideally still be from NEW to TRIAGED to CONFIRMED to ASSIGNED
to RESOLVED.

I don't think anyone seriously uses the VERIFIED and CLOSED stages, to me
those are just bureaucracy.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.krita.org, http://www.valdyas.org