Working with issue tracker

Guidelines

There are 3 projects in JIRA related to IntelliJ IDEA:

IDEA Development (IDEADEV)

This project contains issues to be resolved in the current and (possibly) next major release of IDEA.

IDEA Feedback (IDEA)

This project is an inbox for incoming user feedback (both feature requests and bug reports).

The issues are not supposed to stay here for long. The fate of the issue shall be decided as soon as possible (but no sooner), ideally within 30 days after its creation.

If the bug is clearly described, reproducible and important, it shall be moved to IDEADEV.

If the description is not clear, or more information is needed, an assignee (or the person sorting the feedback) shall ask the reporter for more information. Such issues shall be marked by "Waiting for Reply" status (use "Need Reply" transition). If the submitter does not repond for 30 days, we assume that the problem went away or lost its severity, so we resolve it as "Incomplete".

Hard-to-reproduce bugs shall be assigned to one of the testers. If the tester fails to reproduce it and the submitter does not provide more information, issue shall be resolved as "Cannot reproduce".

Support-like issues ("I cannot find a way to compile my project...") shall be assigned to Sergey Baranov (IDEA technical support specialist).

If the issue is unlikely to be resolved in the nearest future it shall be moved to IDEABKL.

IDEA Backlog (IDEABKL)

This project contains issues which we do not plan to implement in the nearest future (1-2 releases). There are several reasons for an issue to be moved to IDEABKL:

  • The feature is really useful, but there is no practical way to implement this feature soon (technical problems, resource limitations).
  • The feature is OK, but there are many more important features already planned for implementation.
  • The team considers the issue as not useful/critical enough.
  • The feature is OK, but it just does not feel right in IDEA.
  • We fully agree that the issue should be fixed, we just do not know how (usually because of some problem in JDK or 3rd party library). Such issues are marked by "Investigating" status (reachable via "Marked as 'Stalled'" transition). We periodically check if there are any news from the vendors which could help with the resolution.
  • The feature looks reasonable, but the we are not sure how useful it actually is, so we are asking for more feedback. Such issues are marked by "To Be Discussed" status (reachable via "Request voting" transition). Users are encouraged to express their position (both in favour and against) through voting and comments.

We periodically scan IDEABKL project for:

  • Issues most voted for
  • Issues most actively commented (with new agruments in favour of implenting/fixing)
  • Issues with the highest severity

and move the most deserving issues to IDEADEV (though there is no formal rules for making such a decision).

Notifications

To get notifications on what happens in the tracker, you can subscribe to RSS feeds in each of the projects. RSS feeds are available for any filters you create. For example, if you want to get notified on anything going on in the Feedback tracker, there is a preset filter called "All" (available at http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&mode=hide&pid=10080).

At the top of the page you see the Issue Navigator block containing links to different views for this filter:

Figure

The XML link corresponds to a RSS feed you can use to subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader. However, since access to the tracker information is protected, when subscribing to the feed, you will need to add two additional parameters to the URL. They are os_username=<your username> and os_password=<your password>. You do this by appending &os_username=user&os_password=pwd to the end of the URL.

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