Now that the Bug Squad has found around 250 bugs, we thought that it was about time to start looking into sorting what of the bugs where really impacting the platform. Hence, we decided to start triaging them.
We agreed that we would run triaging sessions on a Thursday, every 4 weeks – hence the name Triage Thursday. Last week we held the first session, where we looked at the criticality of the “Gecko” bugs.
This raised the question of what does “Critical” really mean? We decided to follow the existing definitions:
- Critical-crashes, loss of data, severe memory leak
- Major-major loss of function
- Normal-regular issue, some loss of functionality under specific circumstances
- Minor –minor loss of function, or other problem where easy workaround is present
And that this definitions apply to the specific impacted package. But then, just looking at all critical and major bugs across the platform will not give you a full understanding of the gating issues for that release. Some packages, might be not critical for shipping a specific release of the platform and hence a critical bug on such package (for example podcatcher) would not gate the release.
So how can we identify the real “Show Stoppers”? We decided to create the keyword “Blocker”. So, when we review Critical and Major bugs, and we deem them to be show stoppers for the release , they are tag as “Blocker” too. To give real meaning to the list of blockers, we decided to triage all bugs (not just the ones raised by the Bug Squad). There are close to 100 defects in against Symbian^3 PDKs , so we will be hosting a Triage Thursday every week until we clear the backlog.
The next event is planned for 2nd September, feel free to join us!
Victor Tuson Palau 