REMIND and LATER considered harmful [was Re: RESOLVED]

[Benton, Kevin]

>Mick Weiss wrote:
>> Isn't that what comments are for?
>> 
>> status: Pending
>> 
>>>> From a process monitoring perspective, "NEEDINFO" by itself isn't
>enough
>>> from my point of view.  There are other reasons a bug may be in a
>>> PENDING state besides a need for additional information.
>
>the problem is that people run queries, and the only useful things to 
>check on are summaries (which you really don't want to change a lot), 
>status whiteboard (which many people ignore, and which others decorate 
>randomly).
>
>it can't even show flags (it can show keywords, so you could use them 
>for NEEDINFO/STACKWANTED/blah, but most people don't include keywords, 
>some people are actively trying to kill bugzilla's support for
keywords, 
>and they don't clearly indicate that a bug is blocked until something 
>else happens)

I would agree with you except the type of queries I'm talking about are
not usually done by people, but by computers for the purpose of
generating management-level reports.

Managers want to know where issues are.  One way to find out is to look
at why bugs are not getting resolved.  To do that at a glance, the
manager must enforce the proper use of a "pending" status.  By proper
use, I mean that you can't just set status to pending and walk away from
the bug.  There has to be a reason why the bug is set up in a pending
status.  When a bug is put into that pending status, if a pending reason
is attached to the status, someone can verify that the reason makes
sense later on.  When that status is from a specific list of pending
statuses, now the manager can monitor the process.  If the status and
reason are correct, the reporting data makes sense.  If people are
abusing it by setting a pending status willy-nilly just to delay working
on something, managers will be able to look at the information and see
the abuse.

What I'm talking about boils down to making Bugzilla more useful to
management as a process management tool.

---
Kevin Benton
Perl/Bugzilla Developer
Advanced Micro Devices
 
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