2009/5/3 Nicklas Börjesson <nicklas.borjes...@ws.se>: > >>I disagree. When first introduced to them, I found the severity levels >>to be suitably vague to make me read the definitions. Once I read >>them, it was clear to me what each level means. > > Suitably? Do you mean that the severity levels are the way they are to make > people read their definitions? :-) > > Jokes aside, that's exactly what I don't want. > I want them to be even more vague(Low, Medium, High and Critical) and without > any definitions except for the highest level. > This way, one will elicit more how the user perceives the overall impact of > the bug, without having to shoehorn them into some level that only partly > matches their impression. Done with the help of the users indisputable > "common sense", of course.
So you suggest making the severity ratings meaningless to anyone but ... well, you don't actually mention anyone knowing what they *really* mean, but I assume an exclusive clique of developers or bugzilla admins? Users have different opinions on what level of bug they encounter depending on what *task* they're trying to perform, which is not particularly useful to developers who need strict reproducability. > Also, the priority flag should not be visible to the user by default, it > should be a strangely named setting somewhere in the user preferences. It already is a strangely named setting, but the user preferences is far from the right place for it. It still has to be on a per-bug level, and although it may not be the most useful option on bugs it is still used by developers in-the-know, so maybe an additional message that says "Don't change the priority setting unless you know exactly what you're doing"? It's academic anyway, as the priority can be appropriately adjusted later. >>But bear in mind the severity levels are there >>to help the developers categorise the bugs, and they are not there to >>provide feedback to the average non-coding user. > For categorisation, there could be a separate category flag if the > "component" categorisation + priority wouldn't suffice. There already is a separate category flag. It's called "severity" and it indicates roughly the amount of *functionality* lost due to the bug. "Priority" does not indicate the severity of a bug; a bug may have low priority due to limitations outside of Wine (such as some blocker bugs for copy-protection systems which can't be supported in Wine). > Whatever. There are many ways to do it. But currently, the users' impression > of the problem get lost and/or skewed. You're not going to like this, but users don't matter quite *that* much on bugzilla. The bug tracker is a developer's tool, and although users are essential to the process (submitting bugs and new information on request), it should be designed as a developer's tool. A user's impression of their problem is irrelevant to the hard data they can provide about lost or missing functionality.
