Anybody working on expanded priorities?

[Benton, Kevin]

> Thanks -- that makes sense, but we have some change-resistant folks
here who hate ESP but are 
> deeply attached to their current priority scheme (which was an addon
to ESP also!) such that to get them
> into Bugzilla I have to deliver this.

Sorry to hear that, man.  That's not fun to fight that kind of battle,
but here's some ammunition for you.
 
Consider the value of knowing that a bug fix has a set deadline, versus
saying that a bug must be fixed for a particular release (target
milestone), while retaining the ability to know a sense of how urgent
the fix is to the customer (severity) and how critical something is to
fix "right now" versus holding off a bit while keeping deadline and
milestone in effect?
 
In our installations, we have separated out the enhancement severity and
created a new column, bug_type that contains the values defect and
enhancement, among others.  Then, severity belongs to the "customer" and
priority belongs to the "developer" in whatever sense that holds true.
This works extremely well on one of our installations for a wide variety
of projects covering on the order of 3,000 users and well over 50K bugs.
 
I don't know if you're familiar with Agile development methods at all
(specifically Scrum), however, I would hope that you can take one
particular plus away from it:  When a small team of developers commits
to a limited set of tasks over a short period of time, things often get
done very rapidly due to the narrow focus over the short term.  It's
that definition of the small list of tasks that are immediately
important that determine what gets done in the short time window the
team is commited to that helps the team perform very efficiently so long
as those priorities don't change during the development cycle.  This
does not mean that scheduling priorities beyond the short term can be
skipped.  On the contrary, knowing that we're going to LA from NYC is
critical, but to get there, we still have to get in the car and take one
state at a time.  If we don't like the road we're taking now, we can
make small corrections along the way, but we don't decide to take I-80
most of the way then 2/3rds of the way through decide to take a
Gulf-coast route...
 
Good luck,
 
Kevin

	 
	----
	Kevin Benton
	MySQL DBA #5739
	Senior Software Developer
	CAD Global Infrastructure Flow Services
	Advanced Micro Devices
	2950 E Harmony Rd
	Fort Collins, CO  80528
	
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