Bug triage
Note: This page is for analysing and developing a bug triage process. It is a work-in-progress. Comments or suggestions are welcome! Please use the page comments.
Triage is medical term referring to the process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition so as to maximise benefit (help as many as possible) when resources are limited.
Bug triage is a process where tracker issues are sorted and categorised. It should help ensure we appropriately manage all reported issues - bugs as well as improvements and feature requests.
The triage process
General
- Has the issue been reported previously?
- Are the correct components selected?
- If necessary, request more information, such as debug messages for errors
- If applicable, for example the issue covers more than one component, add watchers
Priority
- Security issues and anything breaking badly (error/exception) => blocker
- Anything leading to wrong results => critical
- Anything else => major (apart from minor/trivial tweaks)
Note: Improvements/new features cannot be blockers (in triaging process, though the dev team can raise them later)
Assignee
- Generally be the main component lead
- Otherwise the developer currently assigned to most issues for that component (click on the component link and it will show current assignees and then click on "resolved" to see who has been working on it recently)
- Otherwise leave as moodle.com (for the team to grab later as the sprint progresses)
Fix version
- If the issue is a bug in the current stable version (eg 2.0), assign "Fix version" to STABLE backlog
- If the issue is related to backup and restore, assign "Fix version" to STABLE backlog with high priority
- If the issue is a bug in the current stable version requiring database changes, assign "Fix version" to DEV backlog
- If the issue is a feature request, assign "Fix version" to DEV backlog
Note: A backlog fix version should not be set for quiz component issues.
Label
Issues are labelled triaged to indicate that all the above points have been covered. A comment may be added explaining the reason for any changes.
Triage filter
The filter To triage (Moodle-all) includes:
- Issues with assignee to review (empty/nobody/moodle.com without triage label)
- Issues with fix version empty or set to some released version
- Issues not included in a backlog and not yet labelled as triaged
Triaging priorities
- Recent bugs
- By priority - aim for blockers and critical issues to be reduced to 0
- DEV sprint - focus on components of interest (currently forumng, survey, lesson and gradebook)
