[FieldTrip] How are bugs triaged?

[Schoffelen, J.M. (Jan Mathijs)]

Hi Teresa,

Generally, we don’t have an ‘official’ triage system for the bugs that are filed. The speed with which a bug is considered/resolved depends on a combination of things:

1) the quality of the bug report.
2) the perceived urgency by the people who would be able to resolve it.
3) the estimated cost-benefit relationship for the people who would be able to resolve it.
4) the amount of other piled-up work for the people who would be able to resolve it.
5) the level of serotonin.
6) the prospect of compensation in kind (beer/chocolate/formal involvement in projects etc).

Thus, in general, there may be things that the bug filer can do to increase the probability for consideration/resolution, including adding code snippets and data that allow for a reproduction of a genuine bug, or by including code snippets that implement a new feature. Note that in general feature requests that are not a priority for the daily scientific work of the development/fixing team will get a low priority.

In addition it should be noted that anybody who is on the list is allowed to contribute fixes/patches/features, and that it is not the responsibility of the core development team (which nowadays extends far beyond the people at the Donders Centre). Also, it should be noted that  nobody has a formal requirement to provide fieldtrip/bugzilla support, it’s all pro bono.
This means that we have to squeeze it in besides our daily scientific work and additional chores.

Anyway, the problem is that we are just short-handed, which indeed sometimes results in bugs already being ‘open’ for a long time. Our oldest one still open dates from 2010, so the 2013 you mention is not that bad :o). With regard to the NEX file reader error you mentioned, if you think your workaround might be of benefit of other users, don’t hesitate to contribute!

Best wishes,
Jan-Mathijs




On Jan 4, 2016, at 9:29 PM, Teresa Madsen <tmadsen at emory.edu<mailto:tmadsen at emory.edu>> wrote:

I'm just curious because I've gotten such quick responses and fixes on some bugs, while others sit around for long periods of time without any feedback.  Luckily, they're not anything stopping me from doing my work, but I was just curious if they've been seen and determined to be of low priority, or simply overlooked.

Examples:
http://bugzilla.fieldtriptoolbox.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2978 - "Plot Trial" button on GUI for ft_rejectvisual (summary mode) plots average of all trials instead of the single trial requested - first posted in October
http://bugzilla.fieldtriptoolbox.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2093 - NEX file reader errors - posted in 2013 - Obviously, I've worked around it, but it's still there with a status of "new"!

Hope I'm not being a pest.
Thanks,
Teresa

--
Teresa E. Madsen, PhD
Division of Behavioral Neuroscience and Psychiatric Disorders
Yerkes National Primate Research Center
Emory University
Rainnie Lab, NSB 5233
954 Gatewood Rd. NE
Atlanta, GA 30329
(770) 296-9119
_______________________________________________
fieldtrip mailing list
fieldtrip at donders.ru.nl<mailto:fieldtrip at donders.ru.nl>
http://mailman.science.ru.nl/mailman/listinfo/fieldtrip

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.science.ru.nl/pipermail/fieldtrip/attachments/20160105/9b0ab1ac/attachment-0002.html>