REMIND and LATER considered harmful [was Re: RESOLVED]

[Dave Williss]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Benton, Kevin" <kevin.benton at amd.com>
To: <developers at bugzilla.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2005 12:21 PM
Subject: Re: REMIND and LATER considered harmful [was Re: RESOLVED]
>
> In my view, there are two types of transitions that could be made to
> PENDING.  First, is from NEW/ASSIGNED to PENDING where an engineer has
> acknowledged the bug but is not able to (for whatever reason) handle the
> issue immediately.  The other transition into a PENDING status is when
> QA is similarly awaiting information and unable to handle the issue
> immediately.  From my perspective, PENDING is not an excuse to stop the
> clock.  PENDING is meant only for situations where the bug owner is
> waiting on something outside his/her control and not able to move
> forward until that other piece is resolved.
>
> In my mind, a bug could be pending:
>
> Customer or Third Party Feedback
> Customer or Third Party Action
> Review
> Approval
> Another Bug (in which case it should reference the bug or bugs -
> depends_on)
> Other (catch-all for things I haven't thought of - would need to be
> policed, however).

I like this idea.  We've had to use RESOLVED/INVALID as a way to indicate
that a bug report lacks enough information to handle it.  A status of 
PENDING
would be wonderful!

If the admin configuration had a way to easily change the possible pending 
status
values, it could come with some reasonable defaults out-of-the-box, but 
could also
be easily customizable by the end user.

For us, besides the 3rd-party feedback, the biggest reason for a bug to be 
pending
would be lack of data.  A lot of the errors we get can't be reproduced 
without
the customer sending us the files they're working on.