These are draft suggestions related to the meanings of various entities in Bugzilla. They will be moved to the appropriate wiki pages if finalized and approved.
How to Triage: Add severity and priority
The following is to be added to the checklist at BugZappers/How_to_Triage (draft pending at User:Beland/How to Triage).
X.) Are the severity and priority set correctly?
See BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow for definitions.
BugStatusWorkFlow: Remove duplicate ASSIGNED content
The following is to replace the ASSIGNED section of BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow in its entirety:
ASSIGNED
The triage team believes that this is a complete, actionable bug. A triager has used the Triage checklist for NEW bugs; all necessary information has been supplied, and this bug is not a duplicate of an older bug.
BugZappers/BugStatusWorkFlow: Explain all remaining states
(Previous draft material removed; states are explained at: [1])
Severity and Priority
Possible amplification of: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/page.cgi?id=fields.html
Proposal A
Severity is used to describe how serious a bug is in the context of the specific component:
- Urgent: Software is completely unusable, loses data, or the RPM won't update properly. Frequent or commonly encountered crashes.
- High: Loss of important functionality, or severe usability problem. Infrequent or un-reproducible crashes, or crashes that occur only in specific circumstances.
- Medium: Highly visible cosmetic defect, moderate usability problem, loss of minor functionality, moderate loss of functionality with workaround, or high priority request for enhancement. [default choice]
- Low: Minor cosmetic defect, minor usability problem, or low priority request for enhancement.
Priority is used to indicate what order bugs should be fixed, in the context of the entire release:
- Urgent: Urgent or high severity affecting the majority of users, demanding the immediate attention of an engineer.
- High: Urgent or high severity affecting many users; should be at the top of the package maintainer's todo list.
- Medium: Medium severity affecting many users, or high severity affecting few users.
- Low: Affects a small number of users or is low severity.
Proposal B
Reporter/bug traigers manipulate only with severity of bugs, priority might be originally copied from reporter's setting (alternatively: only triagers and maintainers can change severity once the bug is filed, reporter can set it just when filing the bug):
- Urgent: bug makes whole system unusable (or it is a security bug, which is per definition urgent)
- High: bug makes the program in question unusable
- Medium: real bug which makes program more difficult to use, at least part of the program is available; possibly workarounds are available
- Low: rest ... cosmetic issues, corner cases with unusual configurations, etc.