Another tweak to Bugzilla points

Quite a while ago, Behdad filed a bug about not counting reporting bugs that were later marked as duplicate, incomplete, invalid, notabug, or notgnome (actually, he didn’t include incomplete or invalid, I added those later). His description was a bit broken in that it sounded like he didn’t want closing bugs as such to count, but once we got things straightened out, it sounded like a good idea.

Now, even the most conscientious bug reporter is going to occasionally file a duplicate or invalid report. In fact, this change caused me to be one of the people who lost a point. But long term, it makes more sense to not reward mistakes (or worse, active bad behavior) so I think this will be a good change.

Hopefully this change won’t be accompanied with as many weird anomalies as the last one. (*fingers crossed*) If you do see any, though, let me know.

5 thoughts on “Another tweak to Bugzilla points”

  1. This kind of makes sense (though I also lost a point).

    What about patches? I think I should get mega-points for patches.

  2. While we want to discourage people from filing bugs without checking if they’ve been reported previously, I think we’d still like people to file bugs rather than not file bugs.

    Perhaps it would make sense to still give some recognition for filing a bug that got marked duplicate but not as much as for a non-duplicate bug.

  3. Duplicate bugs do drastically increase the work of the bugsquad (thanks guys!), but don’t they also serve a bit of a useful purpose (i.e. determining how widespread an issue is, etc)?

    In addition, there’s currently no easy way for bug-buddy to determine whether a bug has already been filed (is there?), so people tend to file duplicate reports because they can’t quickly and easily determine whether it has been filed or not and they’d rather err on the side of reporting a dup than not reporting anything at all. It sort of seems wrong to ‘penalize’ those people. But maybe we should just work to adding better dup-detection to bug-buddy (or maybe it’s already in newer versions, I don’t know)

  4. i presume you’re stealing points anytime i file a bug and someone *later* files a bug and then resolves my bug as a duplicate?

  5. It’s not just bug-buddy; the searching capabilities of Bugzilla leave something to be desired.

    I’ve never used bug-buddy (I couldn’t get it to work here), and yet I still seem to have filed over 10 dupes in my life, even though I always search for dupes first.

    As a pure hypothetical, suppose I file a bug that something bad happens in the UI. Also, some developer comes along and finds a problem in the code that could lead to errors elsewhere, so he files a “need to check foo->bar for NULL” bug. Later it turns out mine is a subset of his, so it gets duped. Neither of us could have guessed (or even searched) that this would be a dupe, but it is.

    That’s not to say this change is necessarily a bad idea, but if you’re just doing it to prevent people from scoring higher, note that it’s still easy to add content-free comments and wacky enhancement bugs.

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