Plasma Bug Workflow BOF

[Thijs Heus]

Hi Martin,

Good idea I think (although i won't be there). As an intermittent bug
hunter (sorry, my time is unpredictable so I cannot commit myself too
often), and watching the process a bit for half a year now, I think there
is more than enough willingness to  tame the beast. Clarity in how the
developers - and not just some of the developers! -  want me to be is
crucial here. Stronger: I get a lot more motivated to ignore my real job
and work on this if I can see that the efforts pay off - not just in a low
bug number, but simply in a better workflow for the developers, and better
code.

My personal opinion, which counts for nothing: BKO can only work with less
than 50 bugs or so per component. So be rigurous. BKO can only work as a
developers tool if the developers want to use it, if they can have
developers discussions within the report (like KWin does, or telepathy).
The difference is that Plasma got almost 1400 bug reports in the past half
year more than 10% of all of KDE, not even counting the bugs that ended up
being redirected to nepomuk, kwin, solid, etc. Currently there are ~800
bugs open, my guess would be about 500 real bugs in a current version. That
makes a bug overturn time of only 2 or 3 months.
These are impressive numbers, and they show that Plasma is doing OK in
beating the bugs, even though plasma may not yet be doing OK in beating
BKO. So should we really keep minor bugs that will never be fixed unless as
colleteral damage open? Crashes of over a year old, without any duplicate
since? I am not saying that these are no bugs, just that they are not
helpful reports (anymore), and thus pollute the database. For a highly
visible project like plasma, the amount of eyeballs is so high that an
accidentally closed bug will be reported again. Currently, this is working
against us, but we could make it work a bit more in our favor if we want
to.

Cheers,

Thijs
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