At-A-Glance summary pages - Open & Unresolved

[BrianP]

In the Dragnet 1.0.4 Release notes, http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=4298 it states
At-A-Glance summary pages now list links to both Open and Unresolved items

In this context, what constitutes "Open" and what constitutes "Unresolved"?

What is it that you are trying to display here?
For Open, is it a list of items that are not "Completed"? OR is it those that have a status = "Open"?

It might help if your documentation explained the issue workflow model that Dragnet defaults to - explaining each of the default statuses and which is the final status to use (I assume "Competed") when the item has been resolved.

Brian Price
Silicon Controls

[bfinney]

You've pretty well got it down pat: in this context open = open status; unresolved = completed status.

There's some additional detail about all this in this thread:

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=4371

[Perry]

bfinney:

> unresolved = completed

??

Why does unresolved mean completed? I can't get my mind around that at all.

[Perry]

No response to my query (oops I thought query was from last year, but that is my listed join date) -- let me bump it and see what happens.

[bfinney]

bfinney:

> unresolved = completed

??

Why does unresolved mean completed? I can't get my mind around that at all.

I'm not sure how to answer this apart from the stuff in the link above.

Remember the different contexts: when a developer checks in code that he believes will fix a logged bug, his work is done, therefore the bug enters the "completed" state.

However, this isn't the end for the bug - presubably QA still needs to take a look and either close the bug (status "verified") or bounce it back to "open" status if something is still wrong.

Essentially, the "unresolved" marker indicates to the QA team that they have something to do.

The real problem is that there are no single words that fully express the state of a bug to both coders and testers (and there was much debate about what to call the "unresolved" state before we released). One solution would be to alter the "completed" status to something like "code change complete", but that seems a bit wordy.

[BrianP]

Hi Brody,

I think part of the problem with the status values in Dragnet is that it is attempting to do two things:
1. Describe the state of the bug.
2. Show the disposition of the bug when it is resolved.

An alternate view of bugs requires two separate fields: status and resolution.

The status field indicates the health of the issue. Only certain status transitions are allowed. The resolution field indicates what happened to this issue.

A possible set of Status values is:

• Open Indicates something must be done to resolve the bug.
• Resolved A resolution has been taken and is waiting for QA verification.
• Verified QA has looked at it and agrees appropriate resolution has been taken. Stays in this state until it is released and shipped.
• Closed The bug is considered dead, the resolution is correct.

The resolution field could be any one of the following:
Fixed, Invalid (not a bug), Won't fix, Duplicate, Works for me (can't reproduce).

This is similar to the approach taken by Bugzilla (but simpler).

We are adapting Dragnet to this model by changing the status values and renaming one of the custom fields to "Resolved"

Brian Price
Silicon Controls