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 





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list