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Bug Notifications and Subscriptions: Less Noise, More Control

Note: this LEP was approved a long time ago. It is now being updated, and the updates are in draft form at this time.

We should make subscribing to bugs something people want to do, not dread.

Contact: GaryPoster and the Yellow squad
Originally Drafter: Deryck Hodge <deryck.hodge@canonical.com>
On Launchpad: The story-better-bug-notification tag.

As an Ubuntu developer
I want control over my Launchpad subscriptions
so that I can have an easier time following exactly what I care about in Launchpad.

As an upstream developer
I want control over what information I get from Launchpad
so that I can easily find bugs related to my software.

We are taking two primary approaches to these goals.

• Forward-looking action: Provide more control over subscriptions, so you get fewer unwanted notifications.

• Experience-based reaction: Provide a way to understand why you got a particular notification, and a way to react to it so you don't get notifications like it again.

In addition, we will make a small effort to do better batching of notifications.

If people get fewer Launchpad notifications that do not interest them, they will have an easier time finding and following the bugs and other events that they do care about.

Rationale

Why now?

This story was taken up after consultation with Brian Murray, representing Ubuntu Platform QA. Launchpad's current focus is Getting Bugs Off Ubuntu. As a feature slot came open for development, we asked Brian what would help Ubuntu best manage the amount of bugs they have. He said, better bug subscribing and notifications.

Brian says, "people subscribe mostly to packages, but still get too much mail"

Stats from DB confirm packages are the most subscribed to: https://pastebin.canonical.com/29229/

What value does this bring?

Fixing bug notifications to be less noisy and bug subscribing to allow finer grained controls will allow people to manage the high volume of bugs against packages. This brings value to both Ubuntu and upstream developers by allowing people to better find and follow bugs that interest them.

Stakeholders

Who will care about this work?

In particular, Ubuntu developers who are subscribed to large numbers of packages. In general, anyone who receives a lot of bug mail.

• bdmurray
• bryce
• leanne
• cjwatson
• pitti
• seb128
• ubuntu server team
• ubuntu kernel team
• keybuk (Note: too much bug mail became a serious problem to the end of 10.04 LTS)
• Elliot Murphy (or someone on his team)

When did we last talk to these stakeholders?

Only bdmurray has been consulted so far, and only in preparation for this story.

We hope to use iterative user interface testing to get early input into the work from selected stakeholders, and alpha testing for later input. The alpha testing group is malone-alpha.

Constraints and Requirements

Must

• Users can subscribe to individual bugs, choosing to filter by events. They can receive all notifications as they do now ("the bug receives any change"), or to only receive notifications if the "bug is opened, closed, or reopened," or to only receive notifications if the "bug is changed in any way other than a simple comment." (See further discussion on this in "Nice to have.")

• Users can subscribe to notifications on the bugs of projects, packages, and distributions ("structural subscriptions") with any of the following filters, intersected. Bug 674422

  • Only subscribe to certain events that trigger a notification. Choose one among these options: "bug is opened, closed, or reopened", "the bug is changed in any way other than a simple comment", or "the bug receives any change." (See further discussion on this in "Nice to have.")

  • Only subscribe to notifications that happen on bugs that are tagged with any of one or more tags (or gain or lose these tags). (See further discussion on this in "Nice to have.") Bug 151129

  • Only subscribe to notifications that happen on bugs that have any of one or more selected statuses (or move to or from these statuses).

  • Only subscribe to notifications that happen on bugs that have any of one or more selected importances (or move to or from these importances).

• Users can make multiple bug notification subscriptions for the same project, package, or distribution. Each can have different fliters as described above. Multiple subscriptions that overlap result in only a single notification. This means that, for instance, you can subscribe to all bug notifications in the Launchpad project that have the UI tag, and also bug notifications in the Launchpad project that show when a bug is opened or closed with the tag "bugjam2011". If a notification matches both subscriptions, you only get one copy of the notification.

• Users can edit and delete these subscriptions.

• Users can "mute" their notifications on individual bugs, so even if they would normally get a notification for it because of a subscription on a package, for instance, they will not hear notifications about that particular bug. Bug 204980

• Each email notification will include a link to a page with all subscriptions that led to the receipt of that email. You can mute notifications from that particular bug, or edit or delete the subscriptions that made you receive the email. Bug 649252

• Notifications will batch attachments that are added to the same bug by the same person within a certain amount of time (five minutes now, AIUI). Bug 424849

Must not

• Actions that are done and then quickly undone will not generate notification emails Bug 164196

XXX GaryPoster is working on this and has gotten this far. The "Nice to have" and "Out of scope" sections are only slightly modified, and the rest not at all.

Nice to have

• Only subscribe to certain notices, e.g.
  • "tell me about change in status, importance, or comments, but not linked branches"
  • "tell me only about bug creation and transitions TO or FROM a final status"
  • These should be available for both bugs and structural subscriptions

Out of scope

• Subscribe to search results (related to bug 49752)

I don't think this feature should allow unlimited configuration for notifications. By that, I mean, you could select to be informed of importance changes, but not certain notice changes, i.e. you would not be able to say "tell me when this bug changes from UNDECIDED" or "from WISHLIST to HIGH" or some other very specific choice.

We would have a couple of often demanded statuses pre-configured, i.e. HIGH and CRITICAL for structural subscriptions.

Note from kfogel: we might want to reconsider unlimited configuration. If we can get the UI right, this would be very powerful, because it would enable many different kinds of stakeholders to satisfy their needs. The notification requirements of Ubuntu packagers might be very different from those of, say, hardware manufacturers.

• jml agrees

• deryck, who wrote the original not-unlimited-options proposal, agrees that we should make the subscription system as flexible as possible. As I understand from our design conversations, this is the plan. The original intent of my comment saying we should limit options was to say, let's be opinionated about what options are available in a "subscribe me" widget. We have to make choices there, obviously, and if we offer too many options to cover every possible use case, the widget becomes too complex to be useful for quickly subscribing to individual bugs or project/package bugs. I assumed subscribing to search results would cover the group who wants specific, perhaps uncommon, notifications.

  • Ahh, ok. That makes sense -- jml

Subfeatures