Bugreporting barrier is too low with the new Dr. Konqi

[Matt Rogers]

On Thursday 12 November 2009 01:24:07 am Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> 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.
> 

I'll let other people decide what they want to do about switching to a 
different bug tracker. If we decide to stick with bugzilla, then I'm happy to 
continue taking care of it. If we switch, then I don't intend on taking care 
of whatever the new bugtracker is, unless I actually have an interest in doing 
so, but that's rather unlikely.
-- 
Matt