Introducing time wasters

[Jonathan Gibbons]

+1 for "urgent" or some similar short meaningful name, along with a 
guideline that there should be comments justifying the use of the label.

Another reason for a label instead of priority is that it can be more 
focussed, and can be used in filters/gadgets/dashboards in JBS.

-- Jon


On 9/20/18 9:04 AM, jesper.wilhelmsson at oracle.com wrote:
> OK, I see that this didn't come out as I intended it. The name "timewaster" is clearly not the best since it can be interpreted as "this bug is a waste of time - it shouldn't have been filed" - That was NOT what I meant.
>
> My intention was to have a label to indicate that a bug is urgent to fix because a lot of developers is currently spending time chasing down the same issue over and over.
>
> It has been suggested to increase the priority instead of using a label. One of the reasons that it ended up as a label is that JBS don't have a way to express urgency. Priority and urgency are two different things and should not be mixed, so raising the priority would send the wrong signal. One example is a broken test in tier 1 that is failing at every run. This bug would cause work for every engineer who is running through our tests, be it through the submit forest or in internal test frameworks in our different organisations. Fixing it is clearly urgent. However, raising the priority would mean that it becomes a blocker for the release. A broken test should not block the release.
>
> So, back to the name. Since urgency is what we're after, can we call it "urgent"?
>
> As for the "discussed, proposed, and adopted" part - This is where it is proposed and discussed. (Thanks to everyone who engage in the discussion!)
> It hasn't been adopted yet, it is, as I wrote, an experiment.
>
> Thanks,
> /Jesper
>
>
>> On 20 Sep 2018, at 02:04, jesper.wilhelmsson at oracle.com wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> As an experiment we are introducing a new label in JBS, timewaster. The label is used to tag bugs that for some reason is wasting engineering time. This could for instance be a bug that occurs frequently in our testing and causes many engineers to investigate the failure in different test runs just to realize it's the same issue as have been seen before, or worse, don't realize it is a known issue and files a duplicate bug in JBS. Bugs that cause tests to fail without a proper explanation may also be considered time wasters since several engineers risk to investigate the failures just to realize there is no information to be found. There are other cases as well and there is some flexibility in the definition. If you see an issue that have been wasting your time, feel free to add an explanation to why you think it's a time waster and add the label.
>>
>> The fact that a bug is wasting engineering time should be taken into account when a bug is triaged. A time waster has higher urgency than other bugs. This is not really reflected in the priority of a bug so the priority is not necessarily changed due to the higher urgency. When triaging a time waster, or when adding the label after a bug already has been triaged, it's recommended to notify the developers that work on the affected component, e.g. by sending an email to the proper mailing list and make sure the bug is assigned to someone.
>>
>> If you have a time waster assigned to you, please consider fixing it asap. If you chose to not work on the issue, you should at least be aware that you are choosing to waste more engineering time and others will be affected by this choice.
>>
>> To see currently open time wasters use the JBS filter Time wasters: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/issues/?filter=35335
>>
>> Thanks,
>> /Jesper
>>