The Feature Acceptance Test

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

	Okay, so from the "Practicing What I Preach" department (see 
http://www.codesimplicity.com/archives/98 ), there's a certain test
that I am going to use as an approver from here on out as to whether or
not we want a particular feature. Other approvers are free to do
whatever they'd like, but in the areas that I control, this is the
question that I will be asking of every proposed feature:

	"How does this help people track bugs?"

	If you want to convince me that we should have a feature, write
a convincing answer to this question on the related bug. For some
features, it's obvious--for example, with Whining, the answer would
have been "Well, duh." That's obvious. You don't *have* to answer the
question to get a feature accepted, but I will be thinking about it
when I look at approving or not approving a feature.

	There are indirect things that can help people track bugs.
For example, making Bugzilla easier to install helps people track bugs
because it allows them to more easily install Bugzilla, which is a
piece of software that helps people track bugs.

	Certain features have the potential to introduce a lot of
complexity into Bugzilla. In that case, the question becomes:

	"Does this feature help people *enough* with tracking bugs to
justify the complexity?"

	I will prioritize my review queue largely on the question:

	"*How much* does this help people track bugs?"

	No matter how old or new a review request is, I will give it
more attention if I think your feature helps people track bugs even more
than some other feature.

	I understand that some people use Bugzilla for other things
than tracking bugs, but our focus is on being a bug tracker. Focused
products are better than unfocused products. People can still customize
Bugzilla to do things that aren't related to tracking bugs, or they can
write plugins. But the focus of core Bugzilla should be on helping
people track bugs.

	-Max
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