What are bugs? Are bugs really work items?

[Christopher Hicks]

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, John Fisher wrote:
> In my experience 'enhancements' or more commonly 'features' don't have a 
> priority ( except for the sales group ) they have a scheduled release.

I can see that.  But we have several clients that have features and we use 
bugzilla to prioritize them.

> Changing to 'work items' is a mental jump onto the slippery slope to a 
> task-management system.

I'm running down that slide as fast as I can.

> Bugzilla already has feature bloat, don't make it worse.

I'm not trying to.  I'm trying to make other things fit cleanly with 
bugzilla so that people that want more than bug tracking can have it 
without massive change to bugzilla or the other pieces being melded.

> If OTOH its just a semantic argument, then put in a proper variable 
> and let everybody change it in the params.

My original question was certainly a purely semantic one.  I don't have 
any problem with having a few equivalent terms that people can use as they 
like and letting people choose, but that's just the pragmatic part.  The 
semantic question is intersting because if we accept that bugs can be 
bugs, features, work items, and maybe a few other terms, then maybe some 
folks might consider expanding the appropraite directions for feature 
creep.  Maybe everybody gets this and I'm asking a stupid question.  The 
answers I've gotten haven't really seemed to get the question.  Maybe this 
meandering restatement will be less confusing than my terse prose.

-- 
</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