Quality measurement suggestion

Posted Nov 15, 2007 13:19 UTC (Thu) by walles (guest, #954)
Parent article: Various topics related to kernel quality

Measure how many bugs in the bugzilla get closed every month / week / whatever and make a
graph on the front page of http://bugzilla.kernel.org.

The number of closed bugs will go up if:
* The number of users / testers go up.
* The percentage of users / testers who report bugs go up.
* The quality of the bug reports go up.
* The percentage of bugs that actually get resolved go up.

This is easy to measure, it's related to the kernel quality, and it should be easy (for
somebody with access to http://bugzilla.kernel.org) to visualize.

Quality measurement suggestion

Posted Nov 15, 2007 17:44 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

... and people find and close bugs on Bugzilla that are actually fixed. Some large portion of
the open bugs on Bugzilla at any point (at least historically; not sure if Andrew has improved
this) are issues that were fixed in response to something else and then forgotten by the
reporter. An illustriative anecdote is that somebody has a problem, and submits a
slightly-inaccurate bug report to Bugzilla. This gets misdirected due to the error and nobody
has anything to say about it. The submiter pokes at it further, comes up with a better
charactization of the bug. ignores Bugzilla (since that didn't generate a response before) and
posts to an applicable mailing list. People on the list work with the user and fix the issue.
The reporter is satisfied and has forgetten about Bugzilla entirely. Somebody trawling
Bugzilla digs up the entry, and says that it's gotten no attention. The people who fixed the
actual issue say that the bug report is inaccurate and the issue is probably the one that's
been fixed for ages (assuming they connect the dots at this point and still remember the
issue).