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Re: [wtp-dev] Re-Inventing Hot List

Kosta,

Thx for the suggestions. Let's take a step back for a minute and review why we have a Hot Bug process.

WTP has two main goals:

        1) Provide tools for Web application developers.
        2) Provide a platform for tool developers.

Both of these are very important for the success of WTP. The Hot Bug process is aimed at goal #2.

There are many more application developers than tool developers so the bugs that are important to tools developers can easily get lost in the large bugzilla backlog. To put things in perspective,  there have been a total of 6700 bugs opened for WTP to date, but only 200 of them are Hot Bugs. That's around 3% of the total.

We need to treat tool vendors, aka adopters, differently. WTP is the first Eclipse project, AFAIK, to treat adopters specially. The current process needs to be refined over time. I'm sure we don't have it right yet.

However, I don't think we should rely on severity since I'd like us to use severity correctly. Sometimes an adopter problem does not meet the criteria for Blocking or Critical but is still very important. A Major problem could be enough for an adopter to not use WTP. The meaning of Major is that some major function is unusable. That major function might be exactly what the adopter needs.

This means we need to use another field. Priority is orthogonal to severity. Priority is our way of saying what we are going to work on. If we mark a bug as P1 then it is release-defining, i.e. we should delay the release if a P1 function is broken. That translates into how we allocate our resources. We need to plan our work so that we fix all the P1s first, then the P2s, etc.

To make this more concrete, suppose there was a bug in our HTML editor that caused Eclipse to crash whenever the HTML editor opened a document that contained a URL that was longer that 1,000,000 characters. That would be a Critical bug because it caused a crash, but I would assign it a very low priority because it is a very extreme edge case and would never affect a user.

In contrast, suppose our server tools listed a server adapter for IMB WebSphere. I'd immediately open a Hot Bug to get that corrected. From my point of view that would be a P1, but the severity would be trivial.

Arthur Ryman,
IBM Software Group, Rational Division

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"Konstantin Komissarchik" <kosta@xxxxxxx>
Sent by: wtp-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

02/21/2006 09:36 PM

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[wtp-dev] Re-Inventing Hot List





I’d like to start the conversation about how we can improve the Adopter Hot List process going forward. Here is a proposal to get us started. Feel free to poke holes in it...
 
This proposal places more emphasis on the severity field and establishes a strict release exit criteria for high severity issues. A triage committee (composed of PMC members or their designated replacements) would be established in order to resolve disagreements over the severity and other issues.
 
  • In order to exit a release all S1 (Blocking Severity) and S2 (Critical Severity) bugs targeted to that release have to be resolved. Additionally, there should not be any untargeted/uninvestigated S1/S2 bugs. The triage committee can push bugs of lower severity that are targeted to that release to the next release if there isn’t sufficient time remaining in order to resolve them.
  • All S1/S2 bugs will be reviewed at the weekly status meetings. The severity as set by the originator can be challenged. The triage committee will arbitrate and have the power to assign a lower severity if necessary.
  • Anyone can submit a bug of a lower priority to the weekly status meeting agenda in order to get the status or to request a targeting decision.
  • A bug is only targeted to a particular release when a dev has made a commitment to work on it for that release.
  • Once a bug is targeted, that setting cannot be changed without the approval of the originator or the triage committee. This applies to all bugs regardless of the severity.
 
I believe that if the above process is implemented and abided by than we no longer need the Adopter Hot List. Thoughts?
 
- Konstantin

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