I just added a new field "bug_cause" in my local bugzilla system. This field is basically a copy of the "severity" field. It contains information why this bug was made (e.g. missing information, wrong specification, knowledge problem of developer, etc.) This list can be configured like all other fields (in localconfig). In our company we needed some information (due to ISO 9000) what was the cause of this bug in order to analyse and reduce the causes for bugs.

This sort of thing will be handled by custom fields

Jens: Please comment or correct me if I am wrong... In order for bug 91037 to enable applications such as this, it will be necessary to also have a few other scenarios addressed. This type of root-cause driven quality improvement process tends to be used by enterprise users quality managment implementations. That makes a few capabilities potentially important. 1) When bug logs are shared with customers, the root-cause information may not be. Ideally, this would be a further enhancment of customfields providing a field-level permissions model. 2) The cause information may be added or changed after the bug is already in a resolved state. 3) Reporting based on the cause information may need to couple information from the EAR timetracking fields and/or information from CVS logs to be able to periodically ask questions such as.... "How much time did we spend last quarter on changes to the query interface that resulted from specification issues?" "How much time did we spend last quarter on bugs in the mass-change section?" "How many lines bugfixes last quarter required changes to processmail?"

I'll assign this to myself at least through the requirements capture phase. I'm not yet sure who we will get to write it. If someone would like to engagae one of the Bugzilla consultants on this, I'll help get the ball rolling.

Note sure joel is still working on this. Reassign it back to yourself if I'm wrong.

With the checkin of bug 287334, you could now create a custom field if you wanted to track root cause by bug id. (You already, since 3.0, could have created a custom field with a drop-down list of values.)