Mantis clean up - you can help too!

[henke37]

We should create a forum badge for this. That is, those icons shown under our name. A few different ranks would be needed. Bronze for a few issues, silver for a bunch more, gold for a lot and platinum for the guys who actually does the job.

[Reef]

New motherbug:
0004998: objects overlapping

[Pulse]

I posted a duplicate (w/out realizing it) of the Game crash when saving issue. Here is the link. Can someone add it to the "Mother Bug" issue, as well as correct the spelling? Thanks!

[zidel]

4802: Workers ignore unlocked status of doors unlocked using deployment should be added to 5201: [motherbug] Issues with pathfinding, and reproducibility should be changed to always.

[Reef]

--all issues above this are clicked through--

We seem to have many people absent recently due to vacations and hardware failures, but the work is being continued.

new motherbugs:

• 0005220: I can't rotate some objects
• 0005315: Performance problems

[mazetar]

We seem to have many people absent recently due to vacations and hardware failures, but the work is being continued.

To bad the bugs don't care for vacations ^^

I won't be back into super active mode before mid august as I'm traveling a lot untill then.
Although I'd like to get some bug squashing done when I got some time to kill.

So is there anything specific we should focus on doing now?
Else I'll just divide my time between reading the newest issues and looking into crash reports

[Reef]

I think that it has been already determined that apart from all the duplicates that we are dealing with, there are some genuine bug reports in there as well, and there are SO MANY! This makes stabilizing the product (removing most of the bugs) unfeasible, because the amount of outstanding issues is incomprehensible for humans.

What I am trying to say is that I think duplication of bugs is not enough to get them fixed. We need to put them in a structure which will make them comprehensible. Pruvan has worked on that and I hope he will share it. He has created a tree of the game functionality to which all issues can be related and he has also created a tool which shows how the bugs are currently linked (in most cases they just aren't).

There is no guarantee that organizing such structure will get more issues fixed, but to my best knowledge, this is our best chance.

I also have an idea of writing down issues which are perfectly described (so that the fixing may begin after reading the issue, seeing screenshots and reading the comments), unlike the issues which have unknown reproduction scenario etc. The former are easier to fix than the latter and that might be worth writing down (as links in description of some issue maybe?).

[zidel]

I also have an idea of writing down issues which are perfectly described (so that the fixing may begin after reading the issue, seeing screenshots and reading the comments), unlike the issues which have unknown reproduction scenario etc. The former are easier to fix than the latter and that might be worth writing down (as links in description of some issue maybe?).

Could we use the "confirmed" status for this or are the devs using it for bugs they have confirmed themselves? If we can use it I suggest marking the ones that can be reproduced using the reproduction steps in the bug report as confirmed, and updating product version and reproducibility fields if needed.

For the bugs that can be reproduced using other steps or steps in the comments I suggest updating the steps to reproduce field itself (I'm pretty sure Mantis keeps the old versions around) to keep things in one place. Then later if someone else can reproduce using the new/updated steps it can be set to confirmed.

Thoughts?

[mazetar]

I may be mistaken but I think the statuses weren't an option for this.
We could mayhaps use tags but anyone can do so, so it could get messy but I'd think it could work.
I dunno if theres any other feature in mantis we could leverage for this so lists sounds like a good option.
Pruvan's stuff sounds nice, I would love to see that.

Organizing information in a way that one can acctually wrap ones head around it is key in getting value from any set of data. The motherbugs for example makes it way easier to overview the problems of a system.

[zidel]

At the beginning of the thread Reef mentioned that tags can't be removed by people with updater permissions, so unless that has changed a motherbug type thing would probably be better than tags.

[mazetar]

We can remove tags from a report now.
Although tags can easily get messy.

[henke37]

We desperately need the tags cleaned up, it's a disorganized mess.

[mazetar]

Yeah, there's way too many tags on mantis.
Unfortunatly Updaters can't delete tags from the list of tags.

[xander]

Yeah, there's way too many tags on mantis.
Unfortunatly Updaters can't delete tags from the list of tags.

One doesn't need to delete tags, just ensure that there is a list of useful tags and use those as much as possible. May I suggest that a wiki page or forum post of useful tags might be uh... useful?

xander

[Pruvan]

Figured I might as well post some examples of what we've been working on. Not like it's classified information or anything~

First, an example image of the issues and their links: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpb0i5uwil9ke ... xample.svg

The preview will probably fail, cause the image is too large for Dropbox I assume, so just download it to your PC. For those who don't know, SVG's can be opened with your browser. Just don't use Internet Explorer cause, well, it's sh*t for one, and the issue descriptions don't show either. Use Chrome or something. Then you'll probably want to zoom out as much as your browser will allow so you can see the bigger picture properly.

Mantis Updaters and lurkers should recognize the issue colors, as they're the same the Bug Tracker uses. I.E.: pink for new issues, purple for feedback, gray for dupes, etc... You can mouse over an issue to see its summary, or click the bubble itself to go directly to the issue's URL page. The issues' bubble sizes are determined by the amount of supporters for said issue. Supporters are also passed from children to their parents and from duplicates to their duplicees(or something?), per Reef's request. Issues with a red border are in the Bug Tracker's top 10 list, feel free to note not all of them are actually that big in comparison to other issues.

As Reef mentioned, the amount of issues that haven't been linked yet is painfully apparent. And there's a lot of 'em. The example I posted is from the Tracker's state at the fifth of July (05/07), so it's a tad outdated, but still. Thus Reef, again as mentioned earlier, proposed the idea of creating a collection of trees of sorts to connect these issues faster and more comprehensibly.

And here it is so far: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pddupkdmhoy57 ... xample.svg

Every tree consists of a trunk, possibly branches, and leaves. If you know how trees work you can probably guess what the basic idea is there. Trunks can have branches or leaves, branches can have more branches or leaves, and leaves are supposed to be the "end of the line". Ideally, bugs sit on leaves (the nature lesson is real). How big a tree needs to be (read: how many branches and leaves are specified) is completely up to the Updaters of course (Reef, Mazetar, etc...). What I've mapped out so far mostly contains example leaves. I've proposed that the best way to work is just to start as small as possible, and only turn a leaf into a branch when there are too many bugs sitting on top of it, which Reef seemingly agreed with.

The advantages of structuring the Bug Tracker in this fashion should be painfully apparent. Reef is a better public speaker than me so just read his post again or something if you still don't get what we're trying to do here~ Everything you see is my attempt at visualizing Reef's ideas, so pretty much 95% of all credit goes to him. I'm just the guy who had more free time to do the work Reef couldn't :3