Issue tracker "priority" field meaning [was: [jira] [Updated] (SVN-4555) Centralized user level pristine storage]

[Julian Foad <ju...@apache.org>]

Branko Čibej wrote:
> On 28.10.2018 14:40, Julian Foad wrote:
> >> [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4555?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]
> >>     Priority: Trivial  (was: Major)
> > Brane: why this change? 'Major' (which is the default/usual) priority seemed right to me.
> 
> There are a number of problems with this idea, [...]
> IMO there are much, much more important things we should be doing [...]
> Therefore I'd say that centralised pristine storage is far down the list
> of features we'd like to add.

I don't disagree. It would be good to copy those observations into the issue.

As for priority, the label "trivial" suggests no real impact and we tend to use that for items such as "information in a FAQ entry is outdated" (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4682).

The reporter of such an issue is likely to understand that we feel the issue is of no importance, or that we have completely missed the point, and I want us to maintain a good relationship with our community peers (users).

It seems to me that we really don't mean "priority" literally in our use of the issue tracker: we hardly ever record a decision about the order in which issues will be addressed. Rather we usually mean something like "severity" or "effort", probably conflating those two. In fact, the terms like "trivial" and "major" inherently describe something like a severity or effort rather than a priority.

The old issue tracker used values "P1 ... "P5" for the "Priority" field, and described it as "level of importance ... to help determine the priority ... P1 - Most important ... P5 - Least important": http://subversion.tigris.org/scdocs/ddIssues_EnterModify.html#priority

I would submit that since the majority originate in the old issue tracker, this meaning is most prevalent.

So maybe we should move all the existing "priority" field values to a field named "importance", with the sole exception of any you have deliberately set to actually mean priority.

-- 
- Julian

Re: Issue tracker "priority" field meaning [was: [jira] [Updated] (SVN-4555) Centralized user level pristine storage]

[Branko Čibej <br...@apache.org>]

On 29.10.2018 14:00, Julian Foad wrote:
> Branko Čibej wrote:
>> On 28.10.2018 14:40, Julian Foad wrote:
>>>> [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4555?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel ]
>>>>     Priority: Trivial  (was: Major)
>>> Brane: why this change? 'Major' (which is the default/usual) priority seemed right to me.
>> There are a number of problems with this idea, [...]
>> IMO there are much, much more important things we should be doing [...]
>> Therefore I'd say that centralised pristine storage is far down the list
>> of features we'd like to add.
> I don't disagree. It would be good to copy those observations into the issue.

Will do.

> As for priority, the label "trivial" suggests no real impact and we tend to use that for items such as "information in a FAQ entry is outdated" (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-4682).

[...]

> The old issue tracker used values "P1 ... "P5" for the "Priority" field, and described it as "level of importance ... to help determine the priority ... P1 - Most important ... P5 - Least important": http://subversion.tigris.org/scdocs/ddIssues_EnterModify.html#priority

Indeed, "modern" issue trackers have been ignoring the difference
between the "priority" and "severity" of an issue and conflate them in
some form of "priority" field. I really don't like that, because it
blurs the difference between the "political" and "engineering" aspects
of an issue.

> I would submit that since the majority originate in the old issue tracker, this meaning is most prevalent.

That's possible. In this particular case I did not worry about how the
reporter of the issue feels, since this was a breadcrumb we'd created
for ourselves. But if we use the Priority field to record the effort or
severity, and I feel that "Major" is not correct, calling it "Critical"
or "Blocker" is hardly helpful — this particular feature has almost zero
impact on the day-to-day usage of subversion (disk is cheap, remember?)
but can have a rather important effect in edge cases. What to do?


> So maybe we should move all the existing "priority" field values to a field named "importance", with the sole exception of any you have deliberately set to actually mean priority.

Ah, if we call it "importance" then "Trivial" is correct for this
feature, IMO.

-- Brane