Ice Boxing Old Unconfirmed Issues

[Anthony LaForge]

Howdy folks,

I'm in the process of clearing out our old unconfirmed bugs (20k+ issues), who were filled more than 1 year ago (10k+ issues).  

Even with that chunk removed that will get us down to 30k open issues.

So, what's happening (aka, why not to panic):

• If an issue has 10 or more stars, the label Action-NeedsReview is applied (along w/ P3, since we are talking about old bugs) and the bug stays open.
• Else the issue gets status:IceBox (a closed state)

Q. Why?

A. We'd like to focus QA's efforts on these unconfirmed issues.  Part of that is clearing out the old issues, the other part is prioritizing based on activity signals like stars (i.e. it's why Action-NeedsReview is getting applied)

Q. Will there be more IceBox-ing in the future?

A. Yes, my goal is to get the window down to 90 days.  I however, wanted to start w/ the biggest chunk possible.

Q. How do you protect against discarding useful bugs?

A. The stars are generally a good indicator, that at least at one point in time, the issue was important/affecting a group of people.  That's the reason we keep issues w/ 10 more stars, at least for manual review.

Q. Can I help review some of these Action-NeedsReview bugs?

A. Why yes, yes you can ... triage list (you are awesome, thanks!)

Q. Will I be able to find/search for these closed bugs?

A. Yes, just change the can to All Bugs

Q. Will I still get comments if I'm cc-ed on these old bugs?

A. Yes, they just won't appear on the default Open bugs search.

Kind Regards,

Anthony Laforge
Technical Program Manager
Mountain View, CA

[Yair Yogev]

Hi,

I don't know if that's intentional, but i think that the 10 stars issues got an IceBox status in addition to the priority lowering and NeedsReview tag.

(the post above suggests otherwise)

בתאריך יום שישי, 10 באוגוסט 2012 23:47:44 UTC+3, מאת Anthony LaForge:

[Peter Kasting]

Note that if you get mail about one of these, it's a good chance to look it over and set it to Untriaged/Assigned/etc. if you think it's still valid and actionable.

PK

[Anthony LaForge]

Hey Yair,

Thank you for catching that.  There was an error on my part.  I've gone and bulk edited all of those (>10 stars) bugs's statuses back to unconfirmed (leaving the priority/action-needsreview labels in place).

Kind Regards,

Anthony Laforge
Technical Program Manager
Mountain View, CA

[Peter Kasting]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Anthony LaForge <laf...@google.com> wrote:

Q. How do you protect against discarding useful bugs?

A. The stars are generally a good indicator, that at least at one point in time, the issue was important/affecting a group of people.  That's the reason we keep issues w/ 10 more stars, at least for manual review.

Note for folks with bug-edit permissions: this means that if you triage a bug, and you can confirm it happens, you should probably change it to Untriaged/Available/Assigned.  Leaving things as Unconfirmed means "this bug doesn't verifiably have anything useful in it" which means it's fodder for a future auto-close pass.

(I'm manually checking all the bugs I got mail on, and those I reopen I'm generally setting to Untriaged rather than Unconfirmed.)

PK

[Alexander Potapenko]

Looks like several Valgrind/TSan bugs with existing suppressions got iceboxed.
I don't think it's a good idea, since the suppressions will stay in
our files forever.

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Alexander Potapenko
Software Engineer
Google Moscow

[Anthony LaForge]

Unconfirmed has a very specific meaning (i.e. unvalidated external report) to the global Chrome triage process that we should not be overloading.  I'd recommend changing those bugs to be marked as Untriaged or Available, since they have been confirmed by our infrastructure and require an engineering follow-up.

Given that the bugs that were iceboxed were > 365 days old, it might also be worthwhile to revisit our handling of these bugs anyways (signalling that we should perhaps be more aggressive about open memory leaks).

Kind Regards,

Anthony Laforge
Technical Program Manager
Mountain View, CA

[yurkennis]

The BugDroid bot marked two dozens of issues I reported, for most of them all I can say is: "Still applies to current Stable. Please ask questions that you need to triage the issue. Otherwise I can only  re-create issues identical to the original one, adding more entropy, but clearly no value". Obviously noone will ever read such comments added to the closed bugs, therefore I write it here.

-- yurkennis

[Peter Kasting]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 10:25 AM, yurkennis <yurk...@gmail.com> wrote:

The BugDroid bot marked two dozens of issues I reported, for most of them all I can say is: "Still applies to current Stable. Please ask questions that you need to triage the issue. Otherwise I can only  re-create issues identical to the original one, adding more entropy, but clearly no value". Obviously noone will ever read such comments added to the closed bugs, therefore I write it here.

Writing something here is worthless.  Among other things we have no idea what bugs were affected, and the audience here is thousands of recipients on chromium-dev (far too wide to discuss any of these bugs).

For issues that still apply and are truly worth fixing, please do file new bugs and try and supply as much detail as you can.  If you are concerned that such work would be wasted you can send me the bug numbers and I will triage them.

PK