JDK Bug System Timewasters

Several possibilities of a message's contents crossed my mind when I saw the title of Jesper Wilhelmsson's message "Introducing Timewasters" on the OpenJDK JDK-dev mailing list. In the second or so of reading that link, I wondered if the message would be about one of the following topics:

• People wasting the time of developers working on the JDK
• People wasting the time of developers sharing ideas and responding to questions on the mailing lists
• Trivial defect reports or reports of observations that are intentional (not defects)

It turns out that Wilhelmsson's topic was far more interesting than those. Wilhelmsson opens the message with these two lines: "As an experiment, we are introducing a new label in JBS, timewaster. The label is used to tag bugs that, for whatever reason, are wasting engineering time." That message provides additional considerations to be made when deciding whether to label a bug in JDK Bug System (JBS) with the "timewaster" label.

The "Labels" section of the JBS Overview page describes the purpose of JBS labels: "Users can associate one or more labels with an issue. Such labels are often used to manage informal processes and record ad hoc information." Although a given label does not necessarily change the priority of a bug, it communicates importance informally rather than formally. Wilhelmsson points out that the "timewaster" label communicates additional urgency, "A timewaster has higher urgency than other bugs."

It will be interesting to see how the "timewaster" experiment works and how the requirements develop for determining what is a "timewaster" and what it is not. I just wish I could label some of the defects I get assigned as timewasters.