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One of the main motivations for moving from the bugtrack
majordomo mailing list to the Bugzilla defect tracking system was that the volume of
traffic on bugtrack could no longer be managed by
election services associates. Bugzilla succeeds in this goal,
however we are now faced with the opposite problem. Associates are not notified of new bugs
as they are found and fixed like they used to be. From the looks of things, not
everyone is rushing onto staff site to take a look at the latest bugs. Starting at The report summarizes all bugs that were fixed during the
week, and all bugs that were assigned to engineers but have not yet been fixed
during the week. The core idea
behind the report is to show you the information you need to know, while
omitting that which you don’t.
You can of course still get full disclosure from bugzilla
directly. The Period Activity
Report does not show:
Bugs that are not yet assigned will normally appear in the
next week’s report. You can
find out which bugs are currently unassigned at any time by going to the Users Page and
selecting Not
Assigned. This results in a very short weekly report, which is the
whole idea. With this convenience
comes an important responsibility however.
You must make sure you have read and understood all bugs in the report,
and their impact on your users. The
bugs are in the report because they can have a real effect on your
election. Take them seriously. Major and Critical bugs will appear in
red on the report. We are assigning severities to all bugs moving forward, and
will try to get some assigned retroactively as well. Here is the key: Critical If the bug is ignored, affected
jurisdictions will either violate a major electoral statute, will have the real
possibility of reporting incorrect election results, or will fail to report
results at all. There is no
solution to the problem other than a software upgrade. Major The bug will disrupt the election
process in a visible way. Steps
will need to be taken by election services and/or election officials to work
around or mitigate the problem. It
is however possible to conduct an election with the software as it is. The bug represents a serious
malfunction of the software. The
problem may require steps to be taken by election services and/or election
officials to work around or mitigate the problem, but failing to do so will not
have major repercussions. Minor The problem is technically a bug,
but can be trivially ignored or has an obvious workaround. At worst, the bug may cause confusion to
users. Trivial The problem is technically a bug,
but one would have to take deliberate steps to reproduce the problem that would
not occur in normal election operations.
The problem is not even confusing, just pedantic. (Blocker is
not used) If you feel that your bug has been assigned the incorrect
severity, get with Ravina and she
will get it sorted out. As always, questions and suggestions are welcome. Ken 1The report may change a bit between
when you read this email and Sunday as work continues. |