For the past couple of years we've been using "ASSIGNED" in Bugzilla to mean "the team has accepted that this bug should be worked on by someone at some point", and default component assignees of the team experts in each area. However, this is unsatisfying for a number of reasons, most notably that it makes it really confusing for an outside to tell if something really is being worked on, or is just accidentally cookie-licked. Another big issue is that VE developers can't quickly see what they're meant to be working on from within Bugzilla, because they'll have dozens of hundreds of bugs "ASSIGNED" to them (so we have worklists outside of Bugzilla, which isn't as transparent as I'd like).
Some options come to mind:
- Keep the status quo ante.
- Simplest, but not good.
- Stop marking bugs as accepted, and just let them rot on the vine.
- If every time someone wants to work on a bug they have to have a search through the bug's history to work out whether it's been "blessed" as in the right direction for the product, this isn't really very useful.
- Mark bugs as accepted with rôle account called something like "VE team bugs – take if you're interested!".
- Easy to do, but might be a bit messy? (Also changing the assignee on 900 bugs will be a bit frothy, but we can quiet the IRC bot at least).
- Add a status to Bugzilla between "NEW" and "ASSIGNED" for "ACCEPTED" (or "BACKLOG" or whatever).
- Most teams probably won't use this, but it might be useful.
What do people think would be best?