What are bugs? Are bugs really work items?

[Christopher Hicks]

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Jay Glanville wrote:
> The argument to not use the severity field to indicate feature work is
> because you might want to use the severity field for features.  For
> example, a feature could have a 'critical' severity to indicate the
> amount of work required, or a severity of 'trivial' to indicate it's
> just a small feature.
>
> Basically, the correct answer to this problem is to have a "type" field,
> and to stop calling the items 'bugs'.  For example, all items are 'work
> items', and the type field had possibilities of: bug, suggestion or
> feature.  This would basically capture the situation in a nutshell.
> Hold on, if we changed 'bugs' to 'work items', does that mean we'd have
> to change the name from Bugzilla to WorkItemZilla?  ;-)

This comes from a recent discussion on the webtools list.  Since this is a 
question about the direction/future of bugzilla which I've had on my mind 
and in my inbox quite often recently so I decided to bring this to the 
developers list.  Would the core devs be willing to share their thoughts 
and feelings on this seemingly sensible question?

If I had more sleep I'd slip in something witty about the continually 
blurring semantics of bugs, but I'm not that coherent yet this morning. 
:)

-- 
</chris>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make 
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way 
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare