Automatic Resolution of Unconfirmed Bugs
This page contains details of the procedure for automatically resolving UNCONFIRMED bugs which have remained in that state for a long period of time.
We believe that such bugs are those least likely to result in a useful fix. Therefore, given that we don't have the resources to triage every bug report we get, this is a good way of focussing our resources. Statistical support for this view is available, as is discussion of an earlier draft of the procedure.
Procedure
Warn the community this is about to take place using newsgroup and blog posts. Check with the owners of other Bugzilla products to see if they wish to take part.
At the appointed time, turn off Bugzilla access to all except the person doing the change. This is to prevent people commenting on bugs to say "this bug still exists" while auto-resolve comments are still being added, because this would mess up later searches which are based on time. Note: don't turn off Bugzilla entirely; this should be done through the UI, not behind the scenes.
Search for all bugs:
- in the chosen products,
- in state UNCONFIRMED,
- without the 'testcase' keyword,
- which were last changed more than three months (one product cycle) ago.
For the first round, the products to be processed
are:
Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla Application Suite, Core and Toolkit.
Those which may wish to opt in are:
Calendar.
Those who have definitely opted out are:
Camino, NSPR, NSS, JSS and PSM.
Do a Change Multiple Bugs and add the following comment. The ID is the same on all messages, and is used to make it easy to find bugs with this comment, and for people to filter out the bugmail if they want to.
This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".
This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.
While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug (given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more reproduction information if you have it.
If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved. Thank you for your help in this matter.
The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
Two weeks later, run a buglist of all bugs where a comment contains the ID used, and which have not changed since the date the comment was added. Do a Change Multiple Bugs, and resolve as the new resolution EXPIRED, using the following comment:
This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.
Further Info
For those who were wondering, I did ask jwz what he thought of this plan, given the existence of this rant. He said (and I paraphrase) what we're doing isn't the same as what the Gnome folks did, that it's not ideal, but given the lack of manpower it's probably reasonable.