Bugreporting barrier is too low with the new Dr. Konqi

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Seb Ruiz <ruiz at kde.org> wrote:
> 2009/11/3 Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann at kde.org>:
>> Nokia is now using the JIRA [1] bug tracking system for Qt. I'm
>> personally very interested in that, as I know first hand that
>> Atlassian makes excellent software. However, JIRA is only
>> free-as-in-beer, and I can see how that would make certain people go
>> mental.
>
> Hi folks,
> I've been following this thread and meaning to write earlier, it's
> just that life has been getting in the way.
>
> First up, a disclaimer: I work for Atlassian, the company behind JIRA.
> That said, I do not work on the JIRA team. I don't want this to be a
> marketing or sales pitch, but fear that I'll do a bad job of doing
> that, so please give me benefit of the doubt. This email might get off
> track, but it's a good opportunity to talk about the state of KDE's
> bugzilla nonetheless.
>
> I'm not here to tell you that KDE should move to JIRA, but I would
> like to detail how we use JIRA to try and make the lives of developers
> and managers easier and make them more effective and doing the things
> that they need and want to do. I hope that we can find a solution that
> brings KDE developers more efficiency and creates less head banging
> than our current Bugzilla instance brings.
>
> Primarily, an overview. Each product has it's own project in JIRA.
> These projects are managed and administered by individual teams, and
> in most cases are entirely distinctly and independently from each
> other. There are global settings, but each team can create their own
> customisations to suit their own team processes.
>
> There are a few features in JIRA (or rather, the implementations of)
> which I consider to be really critical to the way that we use the
> software. The first is the notion of versions and milestones (which I
> consider to be second class citizens in bugzilla). We have a very
> agile method of software development, which KDE development parallels
> in many ways. Every project has a list of previous and upcoming
> releases, as well as issues which have been reported against and
> scheduled for fixes in a (or none) milestone. This is useful not only
> for prioritising work, but also for generating changelogs. As you
> might see, a good bug tracker is not only for tracking issues, but
> also just as important (if not more so) for product management and
> planning. I shudder to think of the days I used a `todo` file in
> amarok/ for things that needed to be done. Currently, we really don't
> have much better. A wiki, some reminders from the people on top of
> things during irc conversations.
>
> Another critical feature customisable workflows. This is where
> developers really can get the head up in terms of noise created by
> third parties. A typical workflow might go like this:
>     Needs Triage --> Open --> In Review --> Closed
> (the closed state can be any meta of states, such as dupe, cant
> reproduce etc). Workflows are like a state machine for issues. Define
> them how you like.
>
> You might decide that any new issue that comes from Dr Konqui goes
> through a custom workflow, or that issues created by developers or
> people you trust go directly to the Open state.
>
> Really powerful filters help me find the issues that I want, and not
> the junk. I hope that KDE can find an issue tracking solution that
> actually helps me as a developer do the jobs that i want to do - to
> find those bugs that I want to work on or the blockers for a
> particular release. I think this is even more important when we have
> many contributors looking for JJs or finding dupes.
>
> At the end of the day, whilst bugzilla may indeed have served us for a
> long time and with a good heart, I think it's falling short of the
> expectations that developers have nowadays when dealing with issue
> trackers. At least, it certainly falls short of my expectations.
>
> Best regards,
> Seb
>
> ps - I know that JIRA being closed source will be a deal breaker for
> some of you, and frankly, that's alright. It is however free as in
> beer for foss projects, as we encourage and contribute to many open
> source developments.

Well, anyone want to comment on Seb's proposal? I think it deserves
some feedback.

Personally I would like to see KDE use JIRA, if a full import from
existing Bugzilla reports can be done.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org