different approaches

November 16, 2007 in Mozilla | 7 comments

There’s been a story that’s been echoing around this chamber we call the Internet that basically accuses Mozilla of ignoring 80% of our bugs in run-up to the release of Firefox 3. This is, of course, a deep misinterpretation of what was posted and other people have said a lot on this topic. But what I loved were the different approaches in building responses.

Mike posted something very shaverly that talked about the larger issues, how we’re focused on quality more than time, how the list in question contains more than just things that will keep us from shipping Firefox and generally try to educate people about what we might do as a project in the run-up to deliver a product. (Also a link in his post that tried to educate people about the origin of the modern calendar. Bonus!)

But I really loved Asa’s response which basically amounted to “I call bullshit.” Simple. Direct. Awesome.

I love that everyone has their own way to respond. My original approach was to go in an even different direction, but I love what these guys did so I’ll leave it at that.

  1. frob’s avatar

    frob on November 17, 2007 at 9:07 am

    Hej Christopher!

    We love you too, but we have a very good reason to hate firefox:
    http://blogs.gnome.org/sudaltsov/2007/08/21/hall-of-shame-anywhere/

    –
    Cheers,
    Valek

  2. Martins Skele’s avatar

    Martins Skele on November 17, 2007 at 12:16 pm

    I’ve always been a little uneasy about the practice of keeping track of new feature requests through the bug tracker. I know it is attractive from an administrative point of view, but the “moziila won’t fix bugs” thing is one of the consequences.

    A separate feature dtatabase would make it more difficult for people with a need to poke at the project to assume a high tone of righteousness.

    Martins

  3. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on November 17, 2007 at 7:07 pm

    I’ve actually thought that a bug tracker was a terrible place to drive a release. But it’s a good enough hammer than most people will just use it as opposed to writing something else.

  4. Luis Villa’s avatar

    Luis Villa on November 18, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    Bug trackers are as good, or as bad, as the people who use them. If no one reviews ‘blockers’ to keep them meaningful (apparently the case here?), then of course the bug tracker will be a lousy way to handle the release. If blocker actually means something like blocking, then you can have a meaningful discussion with the bug tracker as the reference and organizational tool.

  5. blizzard’s avatar

    blizzard on November 18, 2007 at 2:46 pm

    We seem to be pretty good about setting priorities for people, which is somewhat different than blocking vs. non-blocking status. But you’re right that is something that needs to be clarified. As shaver mentioned in his blog, we have a lot more people setting blocking status, so I think we need consensus on when something should hit the blocking list.

  6. shaver’s avatar

    shaver on November 18, 2007 at 5:48 pm

    Luis: I don’t know why it appears to be the case that nobody reviews blockers to keep them meaningful. Nothing gets on the blocker list without having been approved there by a member of a knowledgeable group of people, and they are periodically reviewed to make sure that things we thought deserved the blocking+ flag — not always “must absolutely block the release”, as has been explained all over the place — still fit. This process is pretty visible through the planning newsgroup and bugzilla, though not through the headlines of this round of articles.

    (If people hate software because of one old bug, for which there are workarounds present in the form of extension, I suspect those people hate _all_ software. I would certainly have a hard time choosing an operating system on that basis, to say nothing of a mail client, debugger, or image editor!)