Bug Tracking (Re: Squeak 2.8 "finalization")
Marcus Denker
marcus at ira.uka.de
Sat Nov 18 01:52:40 UTC 2000
>
> Please, please do!
> For SCAN, I'd really like to implement (or have someone implement...) a bug
> tracking system. This would be usable both online and offline, and it would
> link bug tracking to actual source code maintenance.
>
On the wiki-mailinglist someone posted a URL of a paper that describes
a very interesting feature for Bugtracking systems called "noisy lists"
>From http://www.lfw.org/ping/sc-roundup.html:
|Submission and Discussion
|-------------------------
|
|The system needs an address for receiving mail and an address that forwards
|mail to all participants. Each item has its own list of interested parties,
|known as its nosy list. Here's how nosy lists work:
|
| a.New items are always submitted by sending an e-mail message to
| Roundup. The "Subject:" field becomes the description of the new
| item. The message is saved in the mail spool of the new item,
| and copied to the list of all participants so everyone knows that a
| new item has been added. The new item's nosy list initially contains
| the submitter.
| b.All e-mail messages sent by Roundup have their "Reply-To:" field set
| to Roundup's address, and have the item's number in the "Subject:"
|
| field. Thus, any replies to the initial announcement and subsequent
| threads are all received by Roundup. Roundup notes the item number
| in the "Subject:" field of each incoming message and appends the
| message to the appropriate spool.
| c.Any incoming e-mail tagged with an item number is copied to all the
| people on the item's nosy list, and any users found in the "From:",
| "To:", or "Cc:" fields are automatically added to the nosy list.
| Whenever a user edits an item's properties in the Web interface,
| they are also added to the nosy list.
|
|The effect is like each item having its own little mailing list, except that
|no one ever has to worry about subscribing to anything. Indicating interest
|in an issue is sufficient, and if you want to bring someone new into the
|conversation, all you need to do is Cc: a message to them. It turns out
|that no one ever has to worry about unsubscribing, either: the nosy lists
|are so specific in scope that the conversation tends to die down by itself
|when the issue is resolved or people no longer find it sufficiently important.
|
|Each nosy list is like an asynchronous chat room, lasting only a short time
|(typically five or ten messages) and involving a small group of people.
|However, that group is the right group of people: only those who express
|interest in an item in some way ever end up on the list, so no one gets
|spammed with mail they don't care about, and no one who wants to see mail
|about a particular item needs to be left out, for they can easily join in,
|and just as easily look at the mail spool on an item to catch up on any
|messages they might have missed.
|
|We can take this a step further and permit users to monitor particular
|topics or classifications of items by allowing other kinds of nodes to also
|have their own nosy lists. For example, a manager could be on the nosy list
|of the priority value node for "critical", or a developer could be on the
|nosy list of the topic value node for "security". The recipients are
|then determined by the union of the nosy lists on the item and all the
|nodes it links to.
|
|Using many small, specific mailing lists results in much more effective
|communication than one big list. Taking away the effort of subscribing and
|unsubscribing gives these lists the "feel" of being cheap and disposable.
|The transparent capture of the mail spool attached to each issue also
|yields a nice knowledge repository over time.
|
|
--
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de
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