Help us clean up the Bug Tracker

[Claw]

Help us clean up the Bug Tracker

(Reposted Dev article. Please click here if you'd like to post a message.)

After the recent pre-release, 1.1 release and follow on patches we’ve finally had some time to look back at the overall bug tracker state and look for some areas for improvement.

There are currently about a dozen tracker projects which cover the various test teams, platforms and backlogs, and while investigating the tickets that are currently open we found ourselves wondering if we should make some bigger changes at this point in time:

• Across all the trackers there are approx. 2700 open “bugs”;
• On top of these are 800 feedback and feature items;
• These tickets go back to the start of the tracker (back in 2012) and as a result a lot of them were most likely fixed, but not closed out in the trackers;

Doin’ the Maths
Now obviously we could start at #1 (“Docking nodes get misplaced on loading certain docked vessels”- it’s already closed, I checked) and work our way through one at a time until we have checked for duplicates, retested or confirmed and followed each one through, but simple mathematics tells us this might be a problem. If we assume it takes 20ish mins to work each of these that’s 112 eight hour days of test time, and that’s if every bug report is perfect and the steps followed don’t need any communication with the reporter to ask questions, clarify, etc.

That would be split across multiple people in reality, but it doesn’t include triage of any new bugs, or involvement in development and testing that’s underway currently or needed in the future.

The Painful Truth
Hopefully many of you reading this come to the same conclusion we did: With the amount of resources we have available within the team, it’s simply not the best use of time to go through all these bugs in this way -- but we do know that there are some very good reports in there that still need to be fleshed out and worked on.

So How Do We Tackle This?
The idea we are working towards is to tackle this in a couple of stages:

1. We are going to mark all open the bug reports prior to a yet to be determined date as requiring clarification;
2. When this is done we need you guys and girls to eyeball these tickets for clarification and let us know if they are still a bug and still important;
3. After a few weeks any bugs that have not been touched will be archived away – still there but removing a lot of noise for the producers and developers to see what is key;

By making these changes we hope to get down to the more important issues that are outstanding and get them front and center in planning and resource allocation. We’ll also be similarly tweaking a number of test and internal projects to help sharpen our focus internally as well.

What’s Next and What Can You Do?
We do know that this may not be a universally appreciated idea, but we do feel it’s a lot better than some of the alternatives and does give us the chance to improve as well (it’s probably better than TriggerAu’s original “Slash and Burn Festival” idea too). 

Before we kick this off we will provide more details about what sort of info and updates will best help us to get to grips on each bug, so please keep your [electronic] ears open.

The involvement you all have with the tracker is massive, there are very few communities as involved or interested in the state and improvement of the games they play as this one and we do truly appreciate it. I think that together we can really clean out the ancient dust bunnies from the tracker and help clarify the key issues.