Program Management for Open Source Projects

Prioritize Bugs

Problem: No one is sure which bugs are the most important. Trivial bugs get fixed long before serious bugs.

The priority of a bug—in which order it gets fixed—is generally up to the person working on it. People are contributing on a volunteer basis; you can’t dictate priorities to them. By and large, they’ll work on the bugs that they think are important, and their own interests and abilities are factors in that assessment. But most developers understand that being in a community means taking the community’s priorities into account. That means the community has some say in what bugs are most important. So let’s develop a framework for evaluating a bug’s priority from the community’s perspective, not the individual’s.

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