[Qgis-psc] Ticket queue management

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 24-12-15 06:40, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Hi all,
> I think keeping the bug queue clean and tidy is an important and welcome
> task. In the last months, I have seen with pleasure several volunteers
> dealing with this. However, I also see that often perfectly valid
> tickets are closed without careful inspection. This is annoying for the
> reporter, and make us missing important information. Of course more
> motivated reporters will check again and reopen it, but I'm pretty sure
> many people will silently slip away.
> I'd therefore call for a more careful handling of these, thinking twice
> before closing a ticket: any thoughts or objections?

Hi Paolo,

I too had some issues [0] closed these days, apparently as part of the
big cleanup...
And while it is a pity that they are closed, apparently I do not take(!)
time to invest further (partly because I cannot because it was happening
at a client where I'm not more anymore...).

I think that is what happens with most of the issues, they get 'stale'
because it is a corner case, the user does not care anymore, or ... etc etc

Closing that ticket is then the best way to do: it is up to the owner to
reopen it, and provide more information. Also new issuers can still find
the (closed) tickets and revive it if necessary.

We do want a nice short really up to date issuelist.

I understand that an issuer can feel a little 'offended' by the rigorous
closing of his/her ticket. But I think in the case of the project it is
just best to be rigorous.

Only thing we could maybe make it better is communication/wording.
Instead of a message:
 "closing for lack of feedback."
maybe have a standard sentence like (english writers please chime in)"
 "sorry, but we are (automatically) closing this ticket because we did
not get any feedback on our last request. Please provide more
information and reopen the ticket if you think we should invest time in
this"
or so...

I've even seen projects where they did this (really) automatically...
An issue list only works when both (issuing and fixing) parties invest
energy in it.
So my conclusion: please keep the list short, BUT reopen issues or put
energy/money in it if it is important (to you OR the QGIS project)

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde

[0] http://hub.qgis.org/issues/13473