I've heard this from others before but I really don't understand the mindset.
What's the harm in keeping the bug open?
But I find that sometimes I can tell from experience that the IR is not actionable and that it will never be fixed. Some examples:
* There's not enough info to reproduce the issue and the user either can't or won't be able to reproduce it themselves. Intermittent bugs generally fall into this category. * The bug was filed against some version of the software that's no longer in production (think of the cloud context where the backend service has been upgraded to a newer version).
Sometimes the cost to investigate a bug is so high relative to the pain caused that it just closed as a WONTFIX. These sometimes suck the most because they are often legitimate bugs with possible fixes, but they will never be prioritized high enough to get fixed.
Or sometimes the bug is only reproducible using some proprietary data that I don't have access to and so you sometimes have no choice but to ask the bug filer "can you still reproduce this?".
Computer systems are complicated. And real-world systems consisting of multiple computer systems are even more complicated.
But in the other cases, closing the bug seems to me to be a way to perturb metrics. It might be true that you'll never fix a given bug, but shouldn't there be a record of the "known defects", or "errata" as some call them?
For your specific scenarios:
- lack of information on how to reproduce or resolve a bug doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that it's not well understood.
- For the "new version" claim, I've seen literal complete rewrites contain the same defects as the previous version. IMHO the author of the new version needs to confirm that the bug is fixed (and how/why it was fixed)
- I agree there are high cost bugs that nobody has resources to fix, but again, that doesn't mean they don't exist (important for errata)
- Similarly with proprietary data, if you aren't allowed to access it, but it still triggers the bug, then the defect exists
In general my philosophy is to treat the existence of open bugs as the authoritative record of known issues. Yes, some of them will never be solved. But having them in the record is important in and of itself.
Yes, fully agreed. But closing a bug doesn't preclude that. A closed bug isn't refutation or denial of a defect. It's just an indication that there is no plan to fix the bug. Not every bug system works like this though. My bug tracker works like this, and I should have more clearly described what a "closed bug" is in my earlier posts.
