Fate vs Bugzilla for feature tracking

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 21 January 2009, Matt Rogers wrote:
> I have yet to see anything concrete from you (or anybody else except lemma)
> regarding things that would make Bugzilla easier for them or their group

i've actually shared a few things in the past with you, but i know how easy it 
is to lose things on irc and this is certainly a better forum. so, noting that 
i'm a believer in process and think that the projects that have some internal 
process for coordination tend to do better, here goes my brain dump:

for me "must haves for true usefulness" are:

* proper comment threading

* ability to easily mix things like screenshots right into the comments areas; 
very important for brainstorming

* ability to delete comments and close reports permanently

* ability to categorize accounts: unknown user, user with demonstrated track 
record, commiter, project lead, downstream, etc.

* ability to rank the importance of a report (not vote on it! i don't care if 
you put 20 votes into a shared pool, i want to know if it's a 1 or a 10 for 
*you*), and have those rankings segregated / weighted by account 
categorization

* ability to view lists of reports based on user account; this would allow us 
to use bugs.kde.org as a dev communication tool for things like patches. right 
now, it's completely unuseful for that because all bugs go into one place and 
so we get a mess of user, downstream and contributor reports.

* ability to have developer discussion of a report in a separate thread from 
user input. it's madenning to not be able to have peer discussions without 
being interupted by random joe user who stops by to share his brilliance.




the "probably already doable but currently clumsy":

* ability to mark, as a project committer only!, a feature for acceptance and 
have that feed into a feature plan report. from that report, i should be able 
to defer features to the next release and otherwise do simple feature plan 
managemet

* ability to mark, as a distro or other blessed downstream entity, items as 
must haves along with their personal "useful by" date (for a distro that would 
probably be the next version release date); i should then be able to view 
these as separate reports from everything else.



the "would be awesome, but not critical":

* more structured input form for reports, and different ones for features vs 
defects. i want use cases for features, and reproduction steps for bugs, e.g.

* ability to comment patches ala review board

* rss feeds; right now we use mailing lists and they are ok-ish but clumsy

* speed: both in response times but also in the UI workflow; for me as a 
developer, a decently designed rich client would be infinitely better than a 
web browser for this

* ability to annotate with amount of expected work effort for an item (skill 
level and time?) to aid in selection of items for others (e.g. new devs coming 
in, sort of like the JJ: thing) but also to help project leads plan a release 
out without being unrealistic ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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