fantasai wrote:

> Ben Bucksch wrote:
> 
>>BTW: I just checked, how many open bugs with nominations <= 1.0 are
>>there: 633 currently. Sounds even doable :-).
> 
> Target milestones for open bugs:
> Mozilla 0.9.6 - 1115
> Mozilla 0.9.7 - 356
> Mozilla 1.0   - 1803


Ben said "nominations", which are indicated by keywords, and means somebody 
has said "I think this ought to get fixed by mX". This field by itself 
doesn't mean a whole lot because the nomination could be from a lone nut who 
wants their pet bugs done now.

The target milestone is set by the assignee and is supposed to mean "I plan 
on fixing this by mY" (but often means "Gee, it'd be nice if I fixed this by 
mZ"). It's tricky to use because of the large measure of wishful thinking as 
demonstrated by the number of bugs which are pushed along from milestone to 
milestone, and also because the bugs that a developer wants to or plans on 
fixing by a certain date don't necessarily have anything to do with bugs 
that are critical for a given release.

 From these two fields alone it's hard to get a reasonable picture of what 
is planned for a certain release, let alone what might actually get done. 
Netscape has been using a keyword system which indicates "nomination 
approved" and "nomination denied" separately from the developer's 
completiong date. It was cumbersome but gave a slightly better picture of 
what was planned for a certain release, although optimism was a feature of 
this system too and initially "approved" bugs got chopped off as targets 
approached.

Both mozilla.org and Netscape are now experimenting with using tracking bugs 
instead of keywords. We'll see if it's any better. Humans being what they 
are I don't know how to squeeze optimism-driven overcommitting out of the 
system.

-Dan Veditz


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