Lowering the Number of Unconfirmed Bugs Comments Off

Since the UNCONFIRMED status was first added to Mozilla’s Bugzilla, we’ve had a problem with unconfirmed bugs. These bugs can sit for days, weeks, months, even years without any sort of triage to confirm or close. As a result, over the years we’ve gone from 29 unconfirmed bugs on February 17, 2000, to a high of 18,246 on September 20, 2005. That number wouldn’t have been much lower had there not been an “EXPIRED” resolution added and process completed on October 13, 2005.

I’ve thought about this a lot. There are numerous unconfirmed bugs that are legitimate bugs or enhancement requests that go unnoticed. Additionally, most bugs that are still unconfirmed are likely duplicates of other bugs, invalid, or, after the amount of time that has passed, “works for me”. So, is it really a problem to have a few thousand bugs that no one’s looked at? Absolutely.

If legitimate bugs exist, we need to triage them and get them in the hands of developers. Bugs that aren’t legitimate should be closed. I’m much opposed to the “expired” idea because there are so many bugs that could get lost in the shuffle.

So, after talking it over with Tomcat, we’ve started setting minor and major personal goals regarding lowering the number of unconfirmed bugs. One of our first goals was getting the number of unconfirmed Firefox bugs under 7000. Now that that’s done (happened two days ago; check out the graph comparing unconfirmed bugs with assigned bug to get a glimpse of how out of control it was), we’ve set our targets on the total unconfirmed bugs.

On May 28, 2007 (just four days ago), we hit a post-EXPIRED peak of 16,693 total unconfirmed bugs. After talking it over with Tomcat, our goal for the month of June is to get that number under 16,000. Pretty easy goal, really, given that we’re already down to 16,571.

The reason I’m blogging about this is because we need your help. If we’re ever going to lower the number of unconfirmed bugs to something reasonable, we need participates from all over the spectrum. Lately, a few developers have spent time cleaning out their Firefox components