177271 - Need root-cause tracking feature

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Bugzilla :: Creating/Changing Bugs, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jens Reimann]

I just added a new field "bug_cause" in my local bugzilla system.

This field is basically a copy of the "severity" field. It contains information
why this bug was made (e.g. missing information, wrong specification, knowledge
problem of developer, etc.) This list can be configured like all other fields
(in localconfig).

In our company we needed some information (due to ISO 9000) what was the cause
of this bug in order to analyse and reduce the causes for bugs.

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

This sort of thing will be handled by custom fields

Comment 2

[Joel Peshkin]

Jens:  Please comment or correct me if I am wrong...

In order for bug 91037 to enable applications such as this, it will be necessary
to   also have a few other scenarios addressed.

This type of root-cause driven quality improvement process tends to be used by
enterprise users quality managment implementations.  That makes a few
capabilities potentially important.

1) When bug logs are shared with customers, the root-cause information may not
be. Ideally, this would be a further enhancment of customfields providing a
field-level permissions model.

2) The cause information may be added or changed after the bug is already in a
resolved state.

3) Reporting based on the cause information may need to couple information from
the EAR timetracking fields and/or information from CVS logs to be able to
periodically ask questions such as....
    "How much time did we spend last quarter on changes to the query interface
that resulted from specification issues?"
    "How much time did we spend last quarter on bugs in the mass-change section?"
    "How many lines bugfixes last quarter required changes to processmail?"

Comment 3

[Joel Peshkin]

I'll assign this to myself at least through the requirements capture phase.  I'm
not yet sure who we will get to write it.  If someone would like to engagae one
of the Bugzilla consultants on this, I'll help get the ball rolling.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

Note sure joel is still working on this. Reassign it back to yourself if I'm wrong.

Comment 5

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

With the checkin of bug 287334, you could now create a custom field if you wanted to track root cause by bug id. (You already, since 3.0, could have created a custom field with a drop-down list of values.)