Bug backlog - now and future. Some proposals.

[Jon Stanley]

Hear ye, hear ye!  At the BugZappers meeting that occurred today,
March 12, 2008, two proposals for dealing with the backlog of bugs,
both now and in the future, were discussed.   It was also discussed
that this would be another useful forum to solicit feedback from.  Our
goal here is not to disenfranchise bug reporters or cause them more
work. Instead, it is designed to introduce predictability into the
lifecycle of a bug.  This is part of the relaunch of the BugZappers
initiative, which I had announced yesterday.  It's important to note,
that while you're just now starting to see stuff from us visibly, this
has been several months in the making and thought through very
thoroughly.

These proposals will be presented at the meeting of the Fedora
Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) tomorrow, with a vote to be
rendered on 2008-03-20 if necessary, and execution to begin shortly
thereafter.  Please feel free to make comments by replying to this
e-mail or editing the wiki.  We also hang out in #fedora-qa on
freenode (my nick is jds2001), and our mailing list is
fedora-test-list at redhat.com for other ways to make contact with us.

The purpose of the meeting today was to solicit input on proposals for
dealing with the current unmanageable backlog of bugs. In the long
term, this backlog will cause Fedora irreparable harm, if it has not
already. Our most valuable asset, the bug reporter, is feeling left
out in the cold. Community triagers feel discouraged by what they see
as a insurmountable task, thereby making the problem feed on itself.
We have to act, and the time to do it is now.

To that end, I am proud to present two proposals, One has to do with
dealing with the backlog that we have now, and the other has to do
with making sure we never get into this situation again -- ever. We
believe that these proposals are the right thing to do, and now is the
right time to do them, right before a release.

I'd also like to give credit where it's due for these proposals. The
primary author of both of them is John Poelstra, without whom many of
the things that have been accomplished to date would not have been. In
just a few short months, we've gone from having almost nothing
formalized to having a formal bug workflow, and having formal plans of
dealing with the backlog, both now and in the future.

It's important to note that these are PROPOSALS at the current time,
and have not been approved in any way. I am expecting, and welcome,
impassioned debate on these proposals. In the course of these debates,
however, lets be civil with one another - we're allresponsible adults
here. If you have comments or concerns about either of the proposals,
there's a comments section at the bottom of both of them on the wiki,
which I encourage you to use. Also, please come to the meeting and/or
reply to this e-mail if you have comments. Please try to back up
changes to the proposals with a specific example of where the proposed
action is wrong/bad/whatever, and what could be done differently to
alleviate the concern.

Also note that the framework of the proposals is there. The exact text
to be found in bugs is still yet to be written, however that will be
written in the next week or so.  I realize that both this introduction
and the proposals themselves are extremely long, but please read them!
The wiki versions of these proposals can be found at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JohnPoelstra/BugzillaExtremeMakeOver