Issue triage

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Bertram
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Issue triage

Post by Bertram »

Hi there,

As certain may have already noticed, I've been doing some issue triaging on Mantis lately, hoping this will be helpful for the whole dev team.

Now, taken from the page 21 from Mantis administration Guide, here are the issue status meanings :
Chapter 4. Issue Lifecycle and Workflow
Issues status meanings :
New - This is the landing status for new issues. Issues stay in this status until they are
assigned, acknowledged, confirmed or resolved. The next status can be "acknowledged",
"confirmed", "assigned" or "resolved".
Acknowledged - This status is used by the development team to reflect their agreement
to the suggested feature request. Or to agree with what the reporter is suggesting in an
issue report, although they didn’t yet attempt to reproduce what the reporter is referring
to. The next status is typically "assigned" or "confirmed".
Confirmed - This status is typically used by the development team to mention that they
agree with what the reporter is suggesting in the issue and that they have confirmed and
reproduced the issue. The next status is typically "assigned".
Assigned - This status is used to reflect that the issue has been assigned to one of the
team members and that such team member is actively working on the issue. The next
status is typically "resolved".
Resolved - This status is used to reflect that the issue has been resolved. An issue can
be resolved with one of many resolutions (customizable). For example, an issue can be
resolved as "fixed", "duplicate", "won’t fix", "no change required", etc. The next statuses
are typically "closed" or in case of the issue being re-opened, then it would be "feedback".
Closed - This status reflects that the issue is completely closed and no further actions are
required on it. It also typically hides the issue from the View Issues page. Some teams
use "closed" to reflect sign-off by the reporter

I noticed that Mantis is full with "New" issues, I wanted to know if to apply the logic about setting the issues status to 'acknowledged' or 'confirmed' adding worthy additional information if possible depending on the situation would be useful or just wasting time.

What do you think about it?

Regards,
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Rotonen
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Rotonen »

I'd really like our utilization of Mantis be a lot better, so I'm all in favor of this.

Sure, it causes a bit more administrational overhead, but it gives out a much clearer and better organized picture of our project and hence lowers the barrier for contribution.

We should also try to force Mantis down the throats of our artists once we actually have proper goals for them.
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John P
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Re: Issue triage

Post by John P »

set goals as in update and maintain the content being worked on page?

http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Content
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Rotonen
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Rotonen »

We really need someone with the time to run after these. We've needed such a person for about four years now.
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Ces
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Ces »

Mantis
― Currently 765 (public) tickets

Code: Select all

174   new
  4   feedback
  4   acknowledged
  4   confirmed
 48   assigned
422   resolved
109   closed
― More people should go through new tickets and mark them apropriately (ideally there should be close to none of these tickets). More people doing QA/triaging would be beneficial as well.
― If I may be so bold. I’d suggest to, if possible, merge acknowledged and confirmed (drop acknowledged), they are quite similar and less status levels may be somewhat clearer to many.
― Decide how to use the assigned status; the one working on the issue or the one responsible for it (pushing)?
― The above would then be somewhat more simplified than the scenario from the manual:

Code: Select all

                NEW
                 |
     +-----------+------------+
     |           |            |
     v           v            v
  CLOSED <-- feedback --> confirmed
                              |
                              v
                         (assigned)
                              |
                              v
                          RESOLVED
Wiki content list
― I’d prefer to stop using this wiki page altogether (whether it looks nice or not) in favour of using Mantis.
― But if the wiki page is here to stay, I’d suggest to simplify it to ease the workload for the maintainer(s). For instance, purge the statuses of MNT and RLS, maybe merge CPT with WIP as well. (It is better to keep these things in one place though; i.e. Mantis.)

In short, I can help from time to time to keep things as these up to date. I’m not an ideal one-person workforce though, as my access to a computer/internet can be quite sporadical and I have other things I devote my time to as well. ;)
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Bertram
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Bertram »

Hi Ces
Ces wrote: ― More people should go through new tickets and mark them apropriately (ideally there should be close to none of these tickets). More people doing QA/triaging would be beneficial as well.
- I'm on it, as well as I noticed Kage, Jaxad, Kess, and many others are. But anyway, the more the merrier as long as everyone follow the same logic.
Ces wrote: ― If I may be so bold. I’d suggest to, if possible, merge acknowledged and confirmed (drop acknowledged), they are quite similar and less status levels may be somewhat clearer to many.
You may be even pedantic if it can improve things :wink: .
As for myself, I'm not for the merging of acknowledged and confirmed. The huge gap between them is that 'Acknowledged' means we know and accept there is a problem.
Confirmed means that we have tried to reproduce the issue, and that we know, even roughly, how to resolve it, and that is way very different into the issue resolution.
A confirmed issue should a description of the use cases and what to do to resolve the issue.
Ces wrote: ― Decide how to use the assigned status; the one working on the issue or the one responsible for it (pushing)?
An issue is assigned to the person willing to resolve the problem. It means not being responsible of the issue itself, but responsible of providing patch, arts, and so on, in order to resolve the issue, which doesn't mean necessary pushing code or binaries himself.
If you provided a patch fixing some bug, and be willing to upgrade your patch 'till it's accepted, I would assign the issue to you.
So, in a few words: the one working on the issue.

I hope things are clearer now.

Regards.
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Ces
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Ces »

Bertram,

First, Ces is Kess and Kess is Ces. Pronounced the same, see? :mrgreen:

Second, good work on all those tickets!

Code: Select all

             yesterday   now  delta
new                174    98   - 76
feedback             4    34   + 30
acknowledged         4    24   + 20
confirmed            4    24   + 20
assigned            48    50   +  2
resolved           422   425   +  3
closed             109   110   +  1
                  ----  ----   ----
total              765   765   ±  0
By the way, I would like to see some daily statistics like this (preferably broken up in projects and targets). Generate a graph as well, and woosh! see all the people run to Mantis. I hope.

Third, regarding who’s working on the code and who’s pushing it, it seems to me that most of assignments are of the latter kind and often take place after the actual pushing.

And a new wish. Please target more tickets! 8)
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Bertram
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Bertram »

Hi Kess!

(How stupid I can be! Ces=Kess)

Well, I have seen we both take care about Mantis. :wink:
Ces wrote: Third, regarding who’s working on the code and who’s pushing it, it seems to me that most of assignments are of the latter kind and often take place after the actual pushing.
I know that. And I think it's not quite fair to the one that did the work. But I, and I hope others too, will hopefully assign in a more satisfactory way.
Ces wrote: And a new wish. Please target more tickets! 8)
If I understand well, you're talking about setting tickets target version...
I prefer to let Bjorn decide about this (even if I don't follow them for now :wink: ).
As for me, making a Roadmap almost never change something about the fact that developers will take their favourite tickets first.

I'll let Bjorn answer on this one.

Regards,
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Ces
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Ces »

Bertram wrote:If I understand well, you're talking about setting tickets target version...
I prefer to let Bjorn decide about this (even if I don't follow them for now :wink: ).
As for me, making a Roadmap almost never change something about the fact that developers will take their favourite tickets first.
I’m mostly interested in seeing more tickets added to the Change Log, that will help ordinary players to see something of what’s happening since last release and will also facilitate making the release announcements. In a similar vein the Roadmap is interesting for those players who want to know a little more, and while devs in general like to work on their favourite stuff I believe quite a few puts quite some time to get the next release out. Thankfully. :lol:
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Bertram
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Bertram »

:D Yes, indeed. Fortunately.

Anyway Bjorn will have to take care about it.

Have a nice day!
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Ces
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Ces »

Now, statistics for statistics sake is just too nerdy and a waste of time for me. But. I was curious, so during one month I grabbed some (not so well thought about) data from Mantis:

Code: Select all

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
              26jul 19³⁰  27jul 14³⁰  02aug 19³⁰  04aug 15⁰⁰  07aug 12³⁰  13aug 14⁰⁰  17aug 19⁰⁰  21aug 21³⁰  26aug 14³⁰
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
new            174 (···)    98 (−76)    71 (−27)    69 (− 2)    68 (− 1)    55 (−13)    65 (+10)    60 (− 5)    51 (− 9)
feedback         4 (···)    34 (+30)    43 (+ 9)    45 (+ 2)    46 (+ 1)    51 (+ 5)    46 (− 5)    47 (+ 1)    57 (+10)
acknowledged     4 (···)    24 (+20)    25 (+ 1)    26 (+ 1)    26 (± 0)    30 (+ 4)    28 (− 2)    29 (+ 1)    30 (+ 1)
confirmed        4 (···)    24 (+20)    47 (+23)    48 (+ 1)    49 (+ 1)    52 (+ 3)    49 (− 3)    53 (+ 4)    55 (+ 2)
assigned        48 (···)    50 (+ 2)    47 (− 3)    41 (− 6)    43 (+ 2)    44 (+ 1)    45 (+ 1)    48 (+ 3)    48 (± 0)
resolved       422 (···)   425 (+ 3)   434 (+ 9)   440 (+ 6)   442 (+ 2)   445 (+ 3)   454 (+ 9)   455 (+ 1)   455 (± 0)
closed         109 (···)   110 (+ 1)   119 (+ 9)   120 (+ 1)   120 (± 0)   122 (+ 2)   122 (± 0)   123 (+ 1)   123 (± 0)
              ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――
total          765 (···)   765 (± 0)   786 (+21)   789 (+ 3)   794 (+ 5)   799 (+ 5)   809 (+10)   815 (+ 6)   819 (+ 4)
open tickets:                                                                         ――――――――――  ――――――――――  ――――――――――
  → 0.1.0                                                                               17 (···)    18 (+ 1)    18 (± 0)
  → 0.0.30                                                                               4 (···)     4 (± 0)     4 (± 0)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
SUPPORT #ifdefs                        194 (···)   194 (± 0)   194 (± 0)   194 (± 0)   192 (− 2)   192 (± 0)   192 (± 0)
TODOs                                  116 (···)   116 (± 0)   118 (+ 2)   122 (+ 4)   121 (− 1)   121 (± 0)   121 (± 0)
FIXMEs                                                           3 (···)     3 (± 0)     3 (± 0)     3 (± 0)     3 (± 0)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[/size]
The last section has the number of those issues left to fix in the client core.

Well, not that much interesting to see (I wouldn’t have continued doing this anyway, not manually at least), except that I managed to get Bertram’s initial Mantis stompage in, just that made this collecting worth it.

As for the stompage, it believe it has brought new life to the bug tracker. While I can see the point that it’s plain silly to change status just because, and waste time on it, many forgotten tickets have been discussed and some even resolved.

Personally, I would like to see continued (and better) statistics iff more tickets is appointed specific upcoming versions, so that the statistics could keep track of the progress towards a certain release over time. And bear with me, this I guess would mostly benefit pseudo-devs and curious players.
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Bertram
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Re: Issue triage

Post by Bertram »

Hi Kess,

I just fell onto your answer, and I'm glad to see this whole work done so far on Mantis (even if a big part is only administrative).

I've heard Mantis has got a Graph view only available to administrators. I also heard that mantis people were planning to make this cacheable, in order to save load time.

I know where this has been going, but maybe Bjorn can give us this kind of information easily from time to time.

Regards,
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