235626 - More timely processing of newly-submitted (UNCONFIRMED) bugs

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(bugzilla.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Alvin Thompson]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040124 Epiphany/1.0.7

see bug 221167 and bug 235603 for more-specific details on why this bug was
submitted.

basically, many bugs submitted seem to dissappear into a 'black hole', where
they are never addressed or even acknowledged for long periods of time. this is
very frustrating for people who took the time to submit the bug, and only serves
to reinforce the negative opinion many people have of the mozilla organization.

i understand there is an overwhelmingly-large number of bugs, but there needs to
be a method put in place to ensure that all bugs are at least moved from
'unconfirmed' within a timely manner (say, 30 days). if for some reason a bug
cannot be addressed, some sort of feedback is in order. even computer-generated
feedback is better than none.

in the case of the two bugs, above, almost 5 months went by without any
acknowledgement that the the bug was actually received by a living person,
despite repeated attempts acertain its status. that is completely unnaceptable.
i don't think that any bugs that i submit are more important than others, but i
do expect to be acknowledged. very frustrating.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Daniel Wang]

we may need more people with canconfirm previleges. gerv, what's your opinion?

Comment 2

[timeless]

we need more developers. moving bugs to NEW w/ the same number of developers
would result in someone coming back next month and complaining that we don't
process NEW bugs in a timely manner.

and then they'd suggest we assign bugs to people. and then they'd complain that
people don't resolve bugs in a timely manner.

we need more developers.

Comment 3

[David G King]

I tend to agree with timeless. I would add a bit to his main statement.

We need more developers with checkin privs. Or, in other words, we need more
good developers.

The next issue would be reviewers and super-reviewers being swamped with
reviewing requests.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Daniel: I give canconfirm to everyone who asks for it, who meets the criteria
and who doesn't look like they'll mess things up. If you want more people with
canconfirm, get more people to start doing QA and then apply :-)

A better solution might be further work on reducing the number of incoming bugs
- perhaps by making it easier to find duplicates.

Gerv

Comment 5

[Troodon]

Comment #2
> 
> we need more developers.

I also think that's the key here. What do you think about a reward system for
new developers or just per bug-solving? I have seen many bugs where people end
up offering rewards and perhaps adding a "reward" keyword to them could attract
developers.
If people pay up for a newspaper ad, they could also pay for hiring developers
to implement new features and/or fix the most annoying bugs for them. Actually,
this can be currently done and allways was possible, but the average user
doesn't know about such methods (maybe something like mozillarewards.com is
needed to bring this closer to the average user).
But this is something that must be done very carefully, to avoid ending up with
a money driven project or at least having that image.
Another idea could be to sing agreements with universities across the word, so
they use Mozilla for their IT engineering excercises, or at least try to promote
Mozilla someway between IT engineering students.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I don't think anything useful is ever going to come of this bug. Discussion of
how best to achieve this sort of this is better in the newsgroups. Bugs are for
concrete actions.

Gerv