Too Many Bugs

[Gervase Markham]

A few points relating to the original post:

MattyT wrote:
> There's a chart here of our reports:
> 
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/reports.cgi?product=Bugzilla&datasets=NEW%3A&datasets=ASSIGNED%3A&datasets=REOPENED%3A&datasets=UNCONFIRMED%3A

Hopefully new charts will make analysis of this sort of thing easier in 
future :-)

> This is RFEs too, but I'd expect them to only increase in proportion to
> bugs slowly (it's a bit less than 50% RFEs ATM), so this chart assumedly
> shows a dramatic increase in bugs.

Not that dramatic. The number of NEW bugs has doubled in about two years 
  (Aug 01 -> Aug 03). And it's a flatter line now than it was.

> While one would expect more bugs from more features, it is still way too
> high.  And no, being able to track so many bugs does not make it a good
> advertisement for us.

What number would not be "way too high"? You shouldn't judge the quality 
of a product (or anything else about it) by the number of bugs open 
against it.

> So anything you could do to help this situation would be good.  If one
> day we could institute a no-known-bugs policy for releases because of
> this, well that would be even better.

I think it's dangerous even to aim at that goal. It leads to never 
releasing anything, not to better software. At some point, the cost of 
fixing the remaining bugs (in delay, effort and possible regressions) 
outweighs the benefit of having them fixed.

Having said all that, I wholeheartedly agree that it would be great to 
sweep all the open Bugzilla bugs and triage them.

Gerv