Bugzilla: A Call to Arms

[Andriy Palamarchuk]

We already had discussion on wine-devel about
importance of polishing Wine, making a set of
applications to work very well.

Cruicial in this process is prioritizing of the
issues, work distribution between developers. The
companies already have internal testing and bug fixing
process.

Of course, each company has their own product-specific
work, but most of the problems are general for Wine.
I suggest to share this work more actively using
Bugzilla.

Recently there was some work done in cleaning the
issues database and it is in pretty much usable
condition.

To start using bugzilla more actively I suggest
following steps:
1) define subsystem/direction owners. The owners will
get their system-specific bugs. They won't necessary
fix the bugs themselfs, but will have complete picture
about all the issues in their subsystems and
coordinate the bug fixing.

Developers, please let me know your areas of
expertese.
I can overview Wine applications.

2) more formally define process of bugs handling and
use this process. There is no high qualification
needed to filter out bad bug reports, duplicates,
request users for more information, attach relay trace
to the bug, etc, etc.
Result - developers will have to spend less time on
discussion trivial bugs with users, will have better
bug reports to work on, users will be more involved
with more active feedback. Some users are very
cooperative and some bug reports are really excellent!
I see that Tony Lambregts, Michael Cardenas, others do
a great work with the Bugzilla database.
I'm also going to  contribute some time for this.

3) Prioritize bugs. This is, probably, part of (2).
Some bugs, while relatively easy to fix provide very
big value for the end user. Often developers do not
choose such issues to work on, exactly because these
issues do not present challenge to them.
BTW, I do not see a field "Priority" in the bugs
entries.

4) Ask users to submit there problems in Bugzilla.
Submitting Bugzilla report allows us to involve users
more actively, persist their bug reports.

Bugzilla is a more scalable approach than using
mailing list only. Of course we still will discuss
bugs on the mailing lists, bug big part of
communication will be unloaded.

There is a lot to do and discuss.
For me the goal is to have this process not worse than
in Mozilla project. This is impressive:
http://webtools.mozilla.org/miscstats/
http://mothra.mozilla.org/webtools/miscstats/

I also like their bug report form:
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html

And this is for 1 application only! I'm sure Wine can
generate much bigger volume of bug reports ;-)

Look forward for your comments.
Andriy

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