Eclipse e4 branch quality stats

Let's start with a citation from the attached mail posted on e4 mailing list: "The Platform UI team will be focusing on regressions and performance for the next while, and not on new features for Kepler yet." Kepler is the next planned Eclipse release, and the list of the most important bugs to fix provided in this mail is also worth to read.

Let's now check the entire list of already known e4 bugs:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&classification=Eclipse&component=UI&product=e4&product=Platform&query_format=advanced&version=4.0&version=4.1&version=4.2&version=4.2.2&version=4.3&version=4.2.1&order=priority%2Cbug_severity&limit=0

As of today it shows: 884 bugs found, reported in 3 years, with the average rate 295 bugs / year.

For better comparison here is the list of all other platform UI bugs (not e4 related), since beginning of Eclipse:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&classification=Eclipse&component=UI&product=Platform&query_format=advanced&version=1.0&version=2.0&version=2.0.1&version=2.0.2&version=2.1&version=2.1.1&version=2.1.2&version=2.1.3&version=3.0&version=3.0.1&version=3.0.2&version=3.1&version=3.1.1&version=3.1.2&version=3.2&version=3.2.1&version=3.3&version=3.2.2&version=3.3.1&version=3.4&version=3.3.2&version=3.4.1&version=3.4.2&version=3.5&version=3.6&version=3.5.1&version=3.5.2&version=3.7&version=3.6.1&version=3.6.2&version=3.7.1&version=3.8&version=3.7.2&version=3.8.1&order=priority%2Cbug_severity&limit=0

As of today it shows: 3137 bugs found, reported in 11 years, with the average rate 285 bugs / year.

Average yearly bug rates are very similar for e4 and 3.x streams, so the first impression after comparison would be that e4 quality is similar to 3.x stream. Nothing surprising so far.

But e4 was only ~3 months a "mainstream" release, not 3 years, so it was exposed to the end users only ~4 months now. 

Let's take e4 recent 6 and 3 months results (Eclipse Juno based first time on e4 was released 27 June 2012) and check how e4 branch quality looks like if being exposed to the "mainstream" end users:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&classification=Eclipse&chfieldto=2012-10-22&chfield=%5BBug%20creation%5D&query_format=advanced&chfieldfrom=2012-04-22&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&version=4.0&version=4.1&version=4.2&version=4.2.1&version=4.2.2&version=4.3&version=4.2.1&component=UI&product=e4&product=Platform

311 bugs in last 6 months => 6220 in 10 years.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=blocker&bug_severity=critical&bug_severity=major&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&classification=Eclipse&chfieldto=2012-10-22&query_format=advanced&chfield=%5BBug%20creation%5D&chfieldfrom=2012-07-22&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&version=4.0&version=4.1&version=4.2&version=4.2.1&version=4.2.2&version=4.3&version=4.2.1&component=UI&product=e4&product=Platform

176 bugs in last 3 months => 7 040 in 10 years.

Now the bug counts projection for e4 is doubling the 3.x stream, and one also can see that bug creation rate is increasing steadily. This  are very alarming numbers.

Anyone here to explain those numbers?

View the original article here