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Re: Severities and priorities in bugzilla
- From: dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)
- To: bangerth at ices dot utexas dot edu, falk dot hueffner at student dot uni-tuebingen dot de,giovannibajo at libero dot it
- Cc: dberlin at dberlin dot org, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at
- Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 14:50:35 -0400 (EDT)
- Subject: Re: Severities and priorities in bugzilla
> I think
> priority and severity are kind of overloaded concepts for many people
> (including myself).
It's a classic mistake to confuse urgency with importance. They are orthogonal
concepts. For many people, this confusion is at the heart of inability to manage
their schedules. A lot of people let urgent unimportant things crowd out less
urgent important things, and other people let important things crowd out
less important urgent things which could get done. John Clees' production
company has a great video on time management that explains and illustrates
this difference in an amusing but instructive manner.
P.S. I think of rate monotonic scheduling from an informal point of view as
being a very nice illustration. RMS says don't confuse urgency with importance
and don't let important tasks preempt urgent ones. Always schedule by urgency,
and if you *can* get everything done, that approach guarantees that you will.
Bottom line, I think it is enlightened and useful for a bug tracking system to
separate these concepts (it is a weakness of the internal system we use at
ACT that these concepts get a little confused).