Bugs and trends

As anyone who hangs out on IRC, subscribes to Mozilla's newsgroups, or reads key mailco blogs on a regular basis knows by now, Thunderbird has dipped under 3,000 UNCO bugs. The key chart on the matter now shows quite clearly that we have beaten that number, the first time in about a year. But this one metric does not reveal all.

First on my list of things to point out is the trends. The UNCO count peaked at 3500 and a bit earlier this year. Extrapolating is not the easiest thing here, but it seems that the overarching trend before the recent freefall would have pushed the UNCO count as high as 3700. Meanwhile, one might fret at the uptick in NEW bugs. However, the overarching trend may have been changing before the bugdays (very hard to tell); worst-case, it's only 200 above where the trend line falls. So 700 bugs have been "confirmed" in some sense at the expense of 200 of them staying valid. Impressive work.

Second is to point out that Thunderbird bugs don't represent the entire picture. Combining the bug counts from the Core mailnews components (Mailnews: * and Networking {IMAP, POP, News, SMTP}) and the mailnews side of Seamonkey as well, the aggregate UNCO count peters out to 3268 as of this writing (which is in the middle of a bugday, albeit a rather tame one). All open bugs come out to 10913.

Some components are "healthier" than others. I would consider a component healthy if the number of UNCO bugs is low with respect to NEW bugs, and the NEW bug count is low with respect to all bugs. For core components at least, I would consider both thresholds to be about 10%. The component I follow most closely (Networking: News) satisfies the first metric but not the second (7/143/897). I've not worked out numbers for the Thunderbird side, but a 30%/10% does not seem irrational. Surprisingly enough, Thunderbird does have a NEW count of about 10% of all bugs (2187/20403); the only component not close to this is RSS (106/658).

Time to jump back into bugday and nurse a sick component back to health!