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Today

OpenSolaris: Bug dependencies and release management

Right now, if you're subscribed to any of the Installation and Packaging community group or project lists, you'll see a lot of commit notifications as the various teams attempt to fix various bugs noted since the second Developer Preview release. We've been using the trial Bugzilla instance—which is becoming the default defect tracker for opensolaris.org it appears—and trying out various features.

For tracking release completeness, we're using "blocker bugs" or "tracker bugs", which are synthetic bug entries that we mark various important bugs ("stoppers") as blocking. That means that we end up creating a little dependency graph that shows what unfixed bugs are stopping us from reaching some initial set of release criteria. We have two tracker bugs

that we're monitoring to make sure we've got a handle on things.

Bugzilla has two nice summaries for showing this information, in addition to the default bug status page. I'll use 571 as the example tracker bug, since we've made 1190 block it—which leads to a more nteresting graph. The tree view is a useful and succinct representation, where indentation shows dependencies. The graph view is a bit unwieldy for this bug, but might be useful if the tree view became too long.

A useful technique if you're trying to bring a release together.

[ T: OpenSolaris Bugzilla pkg ]

(2008-04-17 17:38:20.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Comments:

Regarding the deficiencies of Tree and Graph view, I just watched a UWTV CSE Colloquia video about different ways to visualize complex data relationships like this one:

http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.aspx?rID=24405&fID=4947

It'd be a good summer intern project to apply this toolkit to the Bugzilla project's dependency views.

--Joe

Posted by Joe Moore on April 18, 2008 at 07:28 AM PDT #

@Joe: Thanks for the pointer. I'll have a look. -- Stephen

Posted by Stephen on April 24, 2008 at 08:33 PM PDT #