UsefulBugMetrics
Summary
Identify bug statistics that will be useful to the Ubuntu team during the cycle to drive quality improvements and assist during release periods.
Release Note
Rationale
The bug tracking system of Launchpad has been expanded to record some additional date information regarding bug tasks. The information currently being recored includes the following:
- date-created (the date the bug task was created)
- date-left-new (the date the bug task's status was first changed)
- date-incomplete (the date the bug task's status was last set to Incomplete)
- date-confirmed (the date the bug task's status was last set to Confirmed)
- date-triaged (the date the bug task's status was last set to Triaged)
- date-inprogress (the date the bug task's status was last set to In Progress)
- date-fixcommitted (the date the bug task's status was last set to Fix Committed)
- date-fixreleased (the date the bug task's status was last set to Fix Released)
- date-closed (the date the bug task's status was set to a end status)
- date-assigned (the last date the bug was assigned to someone)
Currently, this information is only available via the +text interface for a bug report. Additionally, this information is not particularly useful by itself. Rather, these dates becoming more useful when considering the difference between any two dates and over a package as a whole. Subsequently, a new tool should be developed to find the differences and aggegrate the information for packages or teams.
Use Cases
Assumptions
Design
Currently the bughelper suite of applications complements the bug tracking system by providing statistics regarding quantities of bug reports and specific lists of bug reports. The new bug lifecycle analysis tool should be included with this package. Additionally this should be a separate tool as bugnumbers currently has an overwhelming number of options and is primarly used to create lists of bug numbers matching specific criteria.
Implementation
UI Changes
Code Changes
The bughelper package relies on python-launchpad-bugs for the parsing of bug pages and accessing attributes of a bug report. Therefore python-launchpad-bugs will need to be extended to make these new bug task dates accessible.
After these new dates are accessible it will be possible to create a new application in the bughelper package to calculate the time for a change to occur for a bug task. This tool should accept any list of bugs, whether it be a package's bugs, a team's bugs, a project's bugs or a whole distribution's bugs, and calculate the time to any change.
After this functionality has been added the most useful statistics should be made publicly available for packages and teams with a substantial quantity of bug reports.
Test/Demo Plan
Outstanding Issues