Bug deadlines (or bug 103636)

[Christian Robottom Reis]

Hi there,

    Our team at Async has recently been asked to work on a deadline
feature for Bugzilla, and we've been hashing out some prototype
implementations that could be used for it.

        http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103636

    The current "official" position is that deadline should live on as a
custom field; I'd like to invite some discussion as to whether this is
the best solution or not given the following arguments:

    - Deadlines go hand in hand with timetracking: right now, though we
      know how much time we have put into a task, we don't know if it is
      late or not.
      
      For bug-tracking software, knowing if you're on-schedule or late
      is arguably an essential feature, and most non-OSS-centric sites
      that use Bugzilla could really appreciate this.

    - It makes us better in face of competing projects which include
      complete timetracking functionality -- right now ours is nice, but
      lacking a target date hinders intelligent features we could offer
      based on this: automatic notification/whining of bugs that are
      overdue, historical analysis of which bugs were fixed late and of
      *how* late.

      This really brings us closer to a professional software
      engineering environment.

    - The change to add a deadline field is not a lot of code to
      maintain, and we would place ourselves as responsible for ensuring
      it stays working over time.

Do any other users feel the need for this feature, and would like to help
me sway opinion in favor of it?

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331