Outstanding Requests in Bugzilla

Many Mozilla project members will wake up this morning to find an email entitled “[Bugzilla] Your Outstanding Requests” in their inbox. This is a reminder of all requests (for e.g. review, feedback, or super-review) which have been outstanding more than 7 days, and from now on will be sent out every week.

This is part of an effort to clear the request backlog (by either cancelling, fulfilling or transferring the requests) and set up a community norm that contributors should not have to wait more than two weeks for a request to be dealt with. (Two weeks is our initial community-wide target, and we hope that people or their managers may set more ambitious personal targets.) We hope that this will lead to fewer instances of new contributors becoming discouraged by being ignored, and if we can get the backlog cleared and then monitor the statistics to make sure the problem does not recur, it will generally oil the wheels of the project.

So please do your best to deal with the requests on your list. It is important to emphasize that this does not necessarily mean doing e.g. a review – it may mean cancelling it (with an apology) because the patch is unwanted or bitrotted, or transferring it to someone else if you are not the right person.

At the time of writing, there are 996,333 waiting-days in the system for the “review” flag (recently it was over 1,000,000), and 1494 reviews have been outstanding more than 14 days. Let’s drive that figure towards 0 :-)

10 thoughts on “Outstanding Requests in Bugzilla

  1. Awesome. This already saved a new contributor’s patch to Venkman (and got me to re-enable my hg account (yes, I’ve been inactive that long… :-( )).

  2. I suppose, next step would be a reminder for assigned bugs, which wasn’t touched for a, say, month?

  3. I think a better next step would be to have a reminder list for module owners (or somebody) for patches that have a review flag set, but not assigned to anybody. You see that occasionally, and it can be hard for somebody new to figure out who should review something.

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