Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Names for Bug States



There is an interesting discussion going on over in a Bugzilla group about changing the default workflow (Open, Fixed, Closed etc) that comes with Bugzilla. My thoughts are that whatever they choose, everyone will want to change it to match their own thoughts on what states a bug should have.

What is really needed are some state names to guide users on how to use a workflow. So in the spirit of the day, I propose doing away with those vague and language-specific words such as "Open" and "Closed" and using integers instead. The first state that a bug starts in would be 0 (or perhaps 1 for non-engineering groups), then the next state should be 1, and then 2, and so on. Next, remove all transitions between states except to the next state and the possibly the previous state.

We now have a simple measure of the state of a bug, acceptable to all!

2 comments:

Tim Kolar said...

The restrictions on state changes seems a bit restrictive to me. I think it would work more smoothly if you were able to move both to adjacent states and to the next or previous prime. For example, state changes from 2 to 1 would be acceptable as well as changes from 2 to 3 and 2 to 5. This would provide more flexibility as well as encourage careful planning of states.

Matt Doar said...

Interesting idea. I was also thinking that reducing the number of states to one (1) might serve some organizations. What do you think?