Introducing time wasters

Gustavo Romero gromero at linux.vnet.ibm.com
Thu Sep 20 16:13:37 UTC 2018


Hi,

On 09/20/2018 11:34 AM, Andrew Dinn wrote:
> Hi Volker/Roman,
> 
> On 20/09/18 15:17, Volker Simonis wrote:
>> maybe there's a little misunderstanding here? As I understand it, If
>> you open a bug and I flag it as "timewaster", that doesn't mean that I
>> think fixing that bug would be a waste of time nor does it mean that I
>> pretend my time is more valuable than yours. It only means that I lost
>> a lot of time searching for a similar problem and in the end I
>> detected that you already found it and there's already a bug for it.
>> In some sense the flag can be seen as a frequency counter for how
>> often a problem occurs.
> 
> Well, I almost posted this this morning ... so here goes. I think there
> is a not-so-little misunderstanding here that we need to avoid.
> 
> The point of this tag is to emphasise that the bug is costly in
> developer time while it remains present i.e. that it is a priority to
> fix this.
> 
> That's precisely the opposite of what the tag will suggest to many
> native English speakers (and some non-native ones, too,it seems) who
> will read it as saying
> 
>    "this bug is not worth fixing and ought to be ignored -- probably
> because it was raised by someone who has nary a clue as to what is involved"
> 
> I'm quite sure this is going to be a regular stumbling block if we don't
> change the name.

As a non-native English speaker I concur with Andrew's comment, i.e. the
first time I read Jesper's description I've got a bit confused because in
the end I was unsure if "timewaster" was meant for bugs important or no
important in general. So by just looking at the name "timewaster" I
tented to conclude that the bugs with that tag were not that important,
because who would like to take something that wastes such a precious
resource like time? :)

Launchpad (from Canonical) has measure for bugs called "Bug heat" and
in my understanding incorporates a measure as Volker said: a sort of
frequency counter based on the number of affected users:

"
Bug heat

Launchpad helps you to appraise a bug by giving you a calculated measure
— called bug heat — of its likely significance. You can see bug heat in
bug listings, and also on individual bug pages, as a number next to
a flame icon.

Here's how Launchpad calculates the bug heat score:

Attribute         Calculation
Private	Adds      150 points
Security issues   Adds 250 points
Duplicates	  Adds 6 points per duplicate bug
Affected users    Adds 4 points per affected user  <=======
Subscribers (incl. subscribers to duplicates)	Adds 2 points per subscriber
"

So I'm wondering if it would be better to implement it no like a discrete
tag but instead as counter in fact, calling it something like "affected-devs",
"affected-devs", or "dev-impact". I understand the urgency is already tracked
by the priority numbers?


Best regards,
Gustavo

> So, perhaps we could use a tag which says more explicitly what was
> intended e.g. "development-slowdown", "dev-brake" or something along
> those lines?
> 
> regards,
> 
> 
> Andrew Dinn
> -----------
> Senior Principal Software Engineer
> Red Hat UK Ltd
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> 



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