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Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs

75 points| skellertor | 7 years ago |hacks.mozilla.org | reply

13 comments

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[+] fpgaminer|7 years ago|reply
Really great use of machine learning! But I wonder why it wasn't called BuggyMcBugface. Perhaps they're saving that name for when they train a transformer model to "translate" bug reports into code commits...

Related, since it's also a Mozilla project, I was shocked to see rust-lang/rust's issue count. I consider Rust to be one of the best maintained open source repositories. Their DevOps is legendary. And yet, the repo has over _4,600_ open issues.

That issue count isn't for lack of fixing things. The Rust project is tirelessly proactive about handling issues, merging pull requests, mentoring committers, etc. I've personally contributed to Rust before and had a splendid and expedient time doing so. In other words, I wouldn't say Rust has 4,600 bugs so much as it has 4,600 coals in the fire.

That's insane. I have a really hard time wrapping my head around the herculean task of triaging and working an issue pool of that size. It really gives me a lot of respect for the team members and volunteers.

I thought it was worth sharing as others may not be aware of just how crazy open source project management can be. It certainly puts tools like BugBug's importance into context.

[+] roro159|7 years ago|reply
To add another example: one of VS Code's releases has interesting statistics of it's issues (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_28).

They did some housekeeping for a month and were able to close 3918 issues, but in the meantime 2187 issues were created.

Open source project management at this scale is truly hard indeed.

[+] microcolonel|7 years ago|reply
Of the bugs I've reported in the Mozilla Bugzilla, zero have been fixed so far I think.
[+] klohto|7 years ago|reply
Forwarded this to our internal Red Hat memo mailing list. Hopefully someone will adopt this as we got products with more issues on record than Mozilla.
[+] sylvestre_|7 years ago|reply
Red Hat is one of the company we were thinking about writing this blog post ;)
[+] Twirrim|7 years ago|reply
for what it's worth, I've generally given up expecting anything to happen from my redhat bug reports.

I tried to dig up the original emails, but I can't see them at the moment. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=571322 particularly springs to mind. Took 6 years before it got closed, and wasn't really resolved. It took more than 3 years to even be asked a question :)

I've a few others along similar tracks, even cases where I've reported breaking bugs in RedHat, where RedHat were the maintainer that fixed the bug in the upstream kernel, and have the expertise still in house, but the fix hasn't been back-ported.