launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Martin.

Thanks for the notes about what you're thinking!  Graham was actually
going to try to get time with you early next week to talk about bug
heat UI, so it's timely.  I have some initial questions/thoughts as I
look at this, too.

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Martin Albisetti
<martin.albisetti@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 1) New page: a list of bugs ordered by bug heat. The problems here to solve
> here are:

Why a new page?  Why not just use the existing hot bugs section of a
project's home page?  This is what we talked about when you, Tom, and
I talked about bug heat at UDS.  Granted we should show more bugs or
click through to a complete list of bugs with any heat, but why think
of this as a new page?  It's really just a bug list like any other bug
list, no?

>    - how to show relative values well (ie, bug 123 is 10 times hotter than
> 122, which comes right after 123 on the list). One idea would be to color
> code the background

Citing our talks at UDS again, I thought we talked about some kind of
heat icon like the flame icon for affected users.  Could we just steal
the current flame icon since 1) affected users shows the number now,
and 2) affected users will factor into heat?  We could have differing
shades of red/orange for levels of heat and/or have slightly larger
flames for hotter levels.

>    - How do we allow dropping bugs from the list by developers who really
> don't want it there?  There should probably be a manual knob to do this.

I'm not in favor of dropping bugs, certainly not manually, which
defeats the whole point of a computed value of heat.  IMHO, If a bug
is hot, it's hot.  Why do you want a bug to disappear from a list of
hot bugs?  Why not use milestones, series, tags or status to control
management of a list?  Or any other search/bug list, which could then
be sorted by heat?  Removing bugs takes away the whole point of it
being a computed value.

I remember discussions about this at UDS with you, and I was never
fully convinced.  After thinking some more about it, it just seems
like a bad idea.  I know you're concerned about a bug that a team may
want to put off working on indefinitely and yet it's still in the list
annoying them, but I think we need to get the algorithm right so this
doesn't happen or the project should use Won't Fix or Invalid to be
honest about intent.

>
> 2) How do you access the page above? (from where, what text, etc)

I think this should just be the hot bugs section of the the bugs home
page, with a link to all bugs with any heat value.  I'm not in favor
of a "XXX hot bugs" filter unless it's just the most hot bugs.  But
I'm not sure what a link would say.  "XXX really really hot bugs" ?
:-)

It might be interesting to prompt with something to the effect of "see
potentially bad bugs here" type links somewhere.  I'm not sure where,
or what that text should actually be.  But it might be interesting and
useful if done right.

>
> 3) How do you display the hotness of the bug from the bug page?  Currently
> we show the number of affected users, just slapping this on the page will
> confuse it since the number of affected users are part of the heat. This
> page will probably require some re-thinking in a more general way to
> introduce it.

Yeah, this gets tricky.  The only thought I have now is to steal away
the flame icon, place it somewhere away from the affected users count,
and have the icon be different color and larger depending on the heat
of the bug.  But what goes in this place if there is no heat value?
And maybe this is a terrible idea.  I'll note that it's late for me if
it is. ;)

>
> 4) When a bug has multiple bugtasks, does it have the same heat in both
> contexts?

I think so, unless bugtasks factor in the level of heat.  In our
current design, they don't.  The factors that determine heat --
privacy, security, number of affected users, subcribers, dupes, and
recent activity -- are all shared across bugtasks.  So unless the
value changes by a change in context, then I don't think so.

I'm sure Jono, Graham, and other developers have many thoughts about
all this, too. :)


Cheers,
deryck


-- 
Deryck Hodge
https://launchpad.net/~deryck
http://www.devurandom.org/