I've been involved in several projects either as tester or developer. In many of projects there were following statuses for defects:
Do you use such statuses and how do you differ them? I ask, because most people can't explain the difference. My understanding is:
WON'T FIX - developer will not fix the defect, due to it's not a defect;
Cancelled - defect should not be fixed, because of lowest priority
As others have noted, these status names aren't very clear. I would prefer more precise and detailed status names:
I think you've got the answers backwards
Won't fix - would apply to a minor bug that is not impacting or may be in an older version therefore not worth the cost of the developers time to fix it but they acknowledge that is it s bug.
Cancelled - This could a bad bug report were it is not reproducible or may be it is not a bug at all.
Taking your 2 descriptions:
WON'T FIX - developer will not fix the defect, due to it's not a defect;
Cancelled - defect should not be fixed, because of lowest priority
It is obvious that the intended difference is:
WON'T FIX - It's not broken, we purposely intended for this behaviour (E.g., feature not a bug);
Cancelled - We agree it is broken, but it is so trivial/inconsequentally we will never be bothered to fix it.
Cancelled seems to imply that either a fix was started but then stopped, perhaps because it turned out to need more resources than originally thought and more than the defect justifies or that the person who entered the defect ticket changed their mind about it being a defect. Won't fix seems like there is an agreement that a defect does exist but that there is a reason for not wanting to fix it at this time (cost vs benefit, potential impact on other functionality, etc.).
At my company we do not use such statuses and I think them to not be a good choice of labeling for the states you described.
Our states consist of
New
In Progress
Ready To Test
Closed
Reopened
And the states should be this simple. Anything more detailed as if it were a bug or if it is too low of a priority should be put in a note.
What these mean in your company, depends on your company.
"Won't fix" should mean: There is a real bug, but for whatever reason a decision was made not to fix it. Maybe the problem was trivial compared to the cost of the fix.
"Cancelled": You have to ask what is meant by this. "Cancelled" usually means something was started, and then stopped, not to be restarted. A reasonable situation would be that a bugfix was started, but then it was discovered that the cost was much higher than anticipated, so the fix was cancelled. There is still a bug. However, this is not something I would bet on, so you really need to check with the company what it means.
Won't fix: a real defect, not working as expected, but the software can be deployed with the fault with a small or no impact on users. Cancelled - there is nothing to fix. therefore it is not a defect. Examples of defects that should be cancelled: -Duplicated: The same defect is alreay logged as another defect by another tester. No need to maintain two records -Work as expected: The tester did not understand what is the correct expected result, hence logged the defect. -Teast Case error: The expected results as written in the test case werec incorrect. The tester found that the actual results are different from the written expected reults, but the needed change is to fix the test case, not the code. -Test environment issue: A module, a sub-system or part of the system is down or disconnected.nothing to fix in the code - restart or reconnect the disconnected module -Functionality not yet deployed into the test environemnt.
