Number of Bugs per product

[Christian Robottom Reis]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 05:02:36PM +1030, MattyT wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 04:49, Christian Robottom Reis wrote:
> 
> > That's easy. We lack developers, and most of the developers we have
> > are too busy to commit significant time to fix their assigned bugs :-)
> 
> Bzzzt.  Wrong answer.

Because that's what you think, or is that a statement of fact? :)

> While assigning off to nobody is a gain in transparency and perhaps
> might help others to see what needs to be done, it's also a continued
> cop-out, and that's what I'm trying to avoid.

We're not copping out, AFAIK. We're overburdened. I've been putting in
60 hour weeks for as long as I can remember (with less that 20% of that
devoted to Bugzilla), and last I checked many of the other regulars were
too. That doesn't make for a very productive team.

Making it easier for newcomers to help and nudging them forward when we
do get some is, in my opinion, the best way to make sure bugs are fixed
(and QA even) given this situation.

> The bug distribution should be reasonably uniform.  Given 850 bugs to 12
> developers, that's an average of about 70 bugs.  A reasonable range is
> therefore 35-140 bugs per developer, we have two developers in that
> range, one of whom hasn't done much coding at all in the past few
> years.  Everyone else is either below it, or way above it with no hope
> of ever fixing all their bugs.

I'm not above that line because I simply can't handle more than what I'm
assigned to. I can't have 35 bugs or more assigned to myself -- I'd end
up not doing anything.

> I don't believe the problem isn't that we don't have enough time, but
> that we're spending too much time writing features and not enough fixing
> the bugs with them.  We have enough time to fix these bugs, we just need

Err, what new features have been holding up bugfixing? I fail to see
"major new features" landing on the trunk -- and we *do* have some that
could have been landed in the period stated.

Have you had a look at the bonsai logs for the past months?

> downward trend.  Assigning to nobody isn't going to have a significant
> impact on that.  I don't want to be standing here in three years time
> complaining about our 1500 bugs.

In my opinion, it will to an extent, in the sense that it helps attract
community participation. If all the main developers are overburdened,
it's great to attract and stimulate outside help. 

Of course, there's the other, appropriate, remark: if you want to help
the bug count, you might want to join us in providing patches that fix
some <wink>.

> their fault and/or pride for their areas.  However, at the moment it
> seems to me that there aren't too many other roads that fix the problem,
> and some good statistics could help us understand what's going on.

I'm actually in favor of getting statistics that tell me how many bugs I
regressed when checking in any new features developed; if you want to
provide some, I think it would be generally appreciated. I just don't
think that will help me squeeze in an extra 20h or so every week to fix
bugs.

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 261 2331