Should enhancement requests be allowed in bugzilla?

[Walter Bright]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> I agree with you it's absurd. But the reality is that people can and 
>> do use bug counts as a measure of quality or progress towards quality.
> Very true.  In fact, rewards are sometimes even given to those who close 
> the greatest number of "bug" entries per release.  Oddly, this seems to 
> encourage developers to produce a shoddy product so they have a 
> never-ending stream of bugs assigned to them.  It also makes no 
> differentiation between implementing new features (difficult and 
> productive work) vs. trivial bug fixes (easy and non-productive work), 
> but I suppose that's what you get when non-technical people are the ones 
> structuring the work environment.

I did see one corporation reward engineers for minimizing the bug count. 
What was the result? Long, knock-down drag-out fights over what was and 
was not a bug. Long, knock-down drag-out fights over whether bug A was 
one bug or really 2 bugs, or 3 bugs. And worst of all, engineers were 
motivated to at all costs avoid entering bugs in the database at all.

It worked for about a week until the engineers figured out how to game 
the system. About a month later, management realized it was a disaster 
and pulled it.