Use of Priority and Severity fields in Bugzilla

[Adam Williamson]

Hi, folks.

We in the QA and BugZappers groups have been working for a while on a
proposal to use the severity and priority fields in Bugzilla. With the
help of various groups, and after considerable feedback both within our
groups and from the development group, we're ready to put this into
place now.

To briefly explain the system, the priority field will be reserved by
policy for developers only. You can use it to organize bugs into the
order you'd like to tackle them. Or, you can not. It's entirely up to
you. The policy makes maintainers the sole 'owners' of this field;
no-one else is supposed to touch it, and there are no rules or
guidelines for how it should be used, it's entirely up to developers'
discretion. Significantly, Bugzilla is now configured so that only
members of the 'fedorabugs' FAS group can touch this field, so there is
less chance that - if you decide to actually use it - disgruntled
users / reporters will mess with your settings.

The severity field is reserved by policy to the Bugzappers team and
developers. Again, it's been restricted in Bugzilla now so that only
members of 'fedorabugs' can touch it. The policy is that triagers will
set this field initially as part of triage, but developers have the
final say, and if a developer decides to change the setting chosen by a
triager, the triager is to accept that decision and not change it back.
The guidelines for how the various settings should be used are here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow#Priority_and_Severity

The severity setting will be used in future as part of the QA and
BugZapper processes - for instance, we're planning to do a weekly review
of 'urgent' severity bugs, and will also review these during blocker bug
review meetings.

This policy and the changes to Bugzilla configuration are all in line
with proposals made during the last few weeks, and sent for feedback to
-devel-list a few weeks back. No opposition has been received to the
proposal in this form. Having said that, if you have a big problem with
this policy, please do let us know and we'll try to accommodate your
concerns.

Thanks very much, and please do contact me directly or test-list (or
anyone else in QA or BugZappers) with any questions relating to this.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

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