OpenJDK bug database: DRAFT Developer Workflow

[Phil Race]

I've not read the entire thread on developer workflow (I've got 
thousands of emails to
read after being out a month, but  I beg to differ on this point at least :

>  To give even more context to this, we haven't missed these sub states at all in JavaFX.

Don't make it sound as if that's a univeral view because its not. Its a personal opinion
and here's mine :

The Jira config we have on FX sucks big time. When I've complained I'm told its
because we use it more or less out of the box. I hope we don't repeat this mistake.

I find states other than "open" to be invaluable in bug management, particularly as an engineer.
Maybe some people see no problem with a big morass of "open" bugs but I feel proper bug management
needs more than that. And I do not have time to re-read the commentary of every bug in my queue to know
which ones I evaluated  etc. ( evaluated in the sense of "cause known" and "fix understood), not
just "triaged". Instead I can sort by state.

-phil.

On 01/04/12 10:36 AM, Richard Bair wrote:
>> [snip, snip]
>>      
>>> I don't see how asking a question relates/compares in any way to having clearly defined states like "cause known" or "fix understood". And of course you never know ALL of the implications - "fix understood" doesn't imply absolute knowledge of every nuance, just as actually fixing the bug doesn't imply you know ALL the implications of the fix you've committed.
>>>
>>>        
>>>> Management would be much better served by updated estimates and risk
>>>> evaluation. I've yet to meet a manager who, deadline looming or not,
>>>> would make a decision to commit-to-fix or reject a bug based on these
>>>> states.
>>>>          
>>> The states convey initial information used to discuss estimates and risks pertaining to the bug. If every bug is just "accepted" then the discussion has to start with "where are with this bug? do we know what's causing it? do we have a fix?" instead of "I see the fix is understood, what do we need to do before pushing it? Is it a high or low-risk fix?"
>>>
>>> Just my opinions - YMMV
>>>
>>> David
>>> -----
>>>        
>> After countless hours (maybe years!) of conducting bug review meetings, my experience is that *every* bug has a story.  Nobody is content to describe their work as "fix understood" or "cause known".  And without the story, reviewers can't make useful decisions about risks, rewards, estimates etc.  The story is (or should be) captured in the commentary and it must be read.  I can't think of any useful decisions that an RTeam or Eng. Mgr. could make simply by looking at a "cause known" or "fix understood" status.
>>
>> Perhaps these statuses are useful for individual engineers to sort their bugs, but I don't see them helping any of the management functions.
>>      
> To give even more context to this, we haven't missed these sub states at all in JavaFX. Most of us are ex-JDK developers, but in JavaFX we have been using JIRA for 3 maybe 4 years now. The states we have are:
>
> 	New
> 	Open (Not my favorite term)
> 	In Progress
> 	Reopened
> 	Resolved (Engineers resolve)
> 	Closed (SQE closes after verification)
>
> There are a couple others in our JIRA system, but we don't use them. To be honest, I've not found a great deal of utility out of Reopened either, but it hasn't complicated my life much so I'm OK with it.
>
> Then there are a number of different "Resolutions" which indicate how we resolved it.
>
> 	Fixed
> 	Won't Fix
> 	Duplicate
> 	etc etc
>
> The only piece of information that we've felt pain over not having, is "Fix Available" or some other method for tagging the issue with what repo the fix is available in. I'd prefer not having a state for this, but just tag the issue (so it is still searchable), and have the tagging done automatically when an issue is pushed into a repo.
>
> As Brian said, I don't see any value from a bug court or release team perspective in having more states or sub states, and as an engineer I wouldn't ever use them. However as an engineer, if you find them useful, you can make use of the custom tag feature in JIRA and keep this additional information in a way that is easy for you to query and understand. Likewise if a team decides they want additional categorization (for example, in the JavaFX UI Controls team we would add a tag ScrollPane for any issues involving the ScrollPane control, etc, and a single Issue might affect multiple controls and so forth), then that is perfectly reasonable as well. But from a higher level release team perspective and from a don't-overcomplicate-my-life perspective and from a universal-process-decision perspective, I much prefer just having a short list of states.
>
> Thanks
> Richard