Plugged Getting Things Done

Every non-trivial problem belongs in the tracker

Schedule a rotating team member to prioritize and assign every bug within 24 hours.
Redirect bugs to appropriate component as needed.

Assign bugs to individual people, never a team or a group
When a person leaves, bugs automatically enter the triage queue for reassignment.
Everyone reviews and updates bugs assigned to them at least monthly, preferably weekly. (He only has 8 bugs assigned to him at Google).
Distinguish between assigned bugs and active bugs.

Elliotte

“Google doesn’t do a good job of” pushed.

He thinks 5 levels is good. He also doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to separate severity and priority.

P0: the world is on fire. IE User data loss. You will spend the money it takes to fix this bug.
- Emergency cherrypick and push to fix
- There should be none of these in your bug tracker at any time.
P1: The world is broken. Drop everything else, but you don’t have to work nights and weekends.
- Push to production can wait for the next release if it’s not too far away.
- There should not be a lot of these. If there are more P1s than engineers to fix them, re-prioritize or escalate for more resources.
P2: the world is incomplete
- Major functionality is missing but users can workaround it.
- Schedule and prioritize, don’t burn yourself out.
- Higher priority than new features
P4: Trivia
- Minor technical debt.
- These can be good on-ramps for new open source contributors.
- “Have a stack of these to give out to new developers”.

You should be able to commit while a release is in QA or release cut. There should not be a time where someone says, “Don’t push top master, I’m cutting a release.”

Re-prioritize
What about bug voting? I don’t get the impression developers pay much attention to that.