Feeling the heat

Bug heat as shown on a bug listing pageAscertaining the importance of a bug can be one of the harder parts of bug triage, right?

It’s no problem if the project’s relatively small and you’re intimately involved with each bug but if you’re helping to triage for a larger project, it’s not always that easy.

To help, we’ve introduced a new indicator of how hot a particular bug is. A bug’s heat is a calculated estimate of its importance, using factors such as how many people are subscribed, whether it’s a security issue, how many people have marked the bug as affecting them, and so on. Note that it is not a replacement for the bug’s human-set importance but rather an aid to the people deciding what the importance should be.

You can see the full details of how bug heat is calculated on our wiki page.

A bug’s heat is shown on the bug report page as four flame icons. The hotter the bug, the more of the icons are lit. You can also sort bug search results by bug heat.
Bug heat shown on a bug page

There’s a bug at the moment that means there’s a fairly high barrier for a bug report to jump before any of its flames light up but take a look at the Ubuntu bug list, sorted by bug heat, and you’ll see the new bug heat icons in action.

Let us know how you’d like to use bug heat.

8 Responses to “Feeling the heat”

  1. Launchpad Blog Says:

    […] of patches to help patches become more easily spotted on Launchpad.  Combined with our work on sorting bugs by a heat number, the Launchpad bugs app is doing more to let users know about the state and quality of a bug […]

  2. mistrynitesh Says:

    Why only four and not five?

  3. Michael Hutchinson Says:

    Back-and-forth problems, and “freeze” motions, between Stellarium 0.10.2 and 0.10.3 and 0.10.1, create big mess — it does not make sense!

    On January 26, 2910, I installed 0.10.2, look fine, then I tried 0.10.3, location messed up.

    Then I got back 0.10.2. I noticed it froze for a little while.

    I still have 0.10.2, deapite to the problems right now.

  4. Matthew Revell Says:

    Hi Michael,

    Is your comment related to this blog post? It doesn’t seem to be but I may have misunderstood.

    If you have a question about Stellarium, you can ask it here:

    https://answers.launchpad.net/stellarium/+addquestion

    Matthew.

  5. Launchpad Blog Says:

    […] hoping that these features, combined with the recently-landed patch notification improvements and bug heat, will make it easier to find the patches worth immediate […]

  6. Launchpad Blog Says:

    […] hottest bug is 297505: Warn users that mailing list archives are public unless the team is actually […]

  7. Launchpad Blog Says:

    […] know which bugs are most urgent to fix, both directly and by feeding into Launchpad’s bug heat heuristic. With these changes, the “affects me” feature will also make it easier for you to keep […]

  8. Ben S. Says:

    Too bad package maintainers don’t care about metrics. For ubuntu-meta, 2 of the 3 hottest bugs have been relegated to the “wishlist” bin and will never, ever be addressed.

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