Firefox/Polish
How We Track Polish Bugs in Firefox
What is a polish bug?
A polish bug is a small blemish to the user experience (either visual or interactive) that individualy will not make much of a difference, but collectively with other polish bugs can play a major role in the user's overall perception of Firefox. Polish bugs are fundamentally just tweaks and refinements, and they do not include creating new functionality, or addressing significant problems with Firefox's user experience or implementation (those are just called "bugs" :)
Examples of Visual Polish Bugs:
- A small alignment problem with controls, down to being a single pixel off
- A temporary icon that needs to be finalized
- A hard coded color that doesn't mesh with the overall color palette of the OS
- An image contains a color profile when it should not
- Something should fade or animate
- Something isn't pixel perfect platform native (the uncanny valley of UI)
- Other examples
Example of Interactive Polish Bugs
- Tearing a tab off doesn't quiet feel right, we need to adjust the threshold
- Resizing a column doesn't interact correctly with the size of the other columns
- A control is firing on downclick instead of uplick (unintentionally)
- A panel isn't drawing in the right location for certain mouse positions
- Other examples
Keyword and Whiteboard Terms
The keyword polish denotes that a bug is a polish bug, giving the bug this keyword will nominate it to receive a whiteboard priority level and possibly a target release from someone on the UX team.
Setting the Whiteboard Priority (mandatory)
The overall polish priority rating is based on a combination of the issue's UI location / frequency / severity.
- UI location: is the polish issue in the main interface, a secondary interface, or even deeper into our UI?
- Frequency: how often the user is likely to encounter the issue?
- Severity: when the user encounters the issue are they even able to notice it?
Whiteboard terms for the levels:
- [polish-p1] Polish issue that appears in the main window, or is something that the user may encounter several times a day.
- [polish-p2] Polish issue that is in a secondary interface, occasionally encountered, and is easily identifiable.
- [polish-p3] Polish issue that is in a secondary interface, occasionally encountered, or is not easily identifiable.
- [polish-p4] Polish issue that is rarely encountered, and is easily identifiable.
- [polish-p5] Polish issue that is rarely encountered, and is not easily identifiable. Bugs at this level are still good to have on record, but are not very likely to be fixed unless someone is very passionate about them.
Extra special whiteboard level term:
- [polish-p0]: This level was initially kind of a joke. The idea is that there can only be one P0 bug at a time, and this bug represents the single most significant polish issue facing Firefox at the moment. Sometimes called the Polish Pope, once complete the UX team will hold conclave to elect a new [polish-p0]. Completion of a [polish-p0] is sometimes celebrated in rituals involving alcohol.
Additional Whiteboard Terms (optional)
Whiteboard terms for difficulty:
- [polish-easy] Something that involves relatively little change to the code base, like replacing an image, fixing alignment, or updating a color
- [polish-hard] Something that involves significant change to the code base, like rewriting how we do focus.
Whiteboard terms for type:
- [polish-visual] A bug that you can see in a screen shot
- [polish-interactive] A bug that you can not see in a screen shot (need to use the keyboard or mouse, etc.)
Setting the Target Milestone
Same as target milestones for other bugs, currently we are setting bugs we plan to complete to either:
- Firefox 3.6
- Firefox 3.7
- Not set = not a high priority for the next two releases (or hasn't been set yet)
Current Polish Bugs
Here are links showing the current set of polish bugs in Firefox+Core+Toolkit
Need to Triage
- Core polish bugs in need of a priority level (these may or may not fit into the above definition of polish, in which case we just leave it alone)
- Toolkit polish bugs in need of a priority level (these may or may not fit into the above definition of polish, in which case we just leave it alone)
Polish Bugs by Priority
- The one and only polish-p0
- All open polish-p1
- All open polish-p2
- All open polish-p3
- All open polish-p4