On Fri, 2013-12-20 at 12:51 -0500, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > as discussed, being in the group is not intended to be
actually
> > necessary for any QA tasks, we're just going to have it to allow you to
> > get voting rights and fedorapeople space and as a
> > handy-but-probably-incomplete list of people involved with QA. no plans
> > to change any of our current tasks or processes to depend on group
> > membership in any way.
>
> oh, and group membership gives you 'editbugs' privs in Bugzilla, so you
> can do triage.
I like the change with qa group in general. I have a few concerns as well:
1. Since we give people editbugs privileges (I assume that means that
you can freely edit any item in any bug report), we should only accept
people we trust and they should be aware of their powers and what to
do (not to do) with them. Since there is no description box for the
group in FAS, we should probably create a wiki page where we describe
the granted powers and responsibilities and link to that. Also there
should be a section with guidelines for sponsors, so that they can
easily decide whether to accept an application.
In theory, you're right. In practice...meeeeh. editbugs privs are more
or less given out like candy; there's 2300+ people in the 'fedorabugs'
group already as things stand. As nirik observed, it's never really been
a problem. Messing up bug reports is not enough fun for trolls,
apparently.
If we want to try and tighten it up a bit we could, but I definitely
don't think we need to be setting high bars, or anything. I'd figure
anyone who's a semi-regular poster here or Bodhi feedback poster or
validation tester or whatever is fine to be approved; anyone for whom
someone would say 'oh, yeah, I know that person, they test stuff.'
2. Currently the "Rules for Application:" feels like
"free voting
rights! free online space! free hot dogs!". I think it should clearly
explain that we don't grant the membership to everyone, we grant it
only to people that we see around often, we know that they do good
work, and we know that they won't abuse their new powers.
See that's more or less what I just said, only somehow it sounds much
more 'forbidding', like you have to pass an exam to get in or something.
I do share viking's concern that this doesn't wind up being some 'elite'
group of testers or something...
(Hm, I wonder whether we really want to grant editbugs privs to
every
single person who performed a reasonable amount of testing for Fedora.
Should these two things be coupled together? If somebody reported a
few bugs, I think it's OK to reward him with voting rights and such,
but he should not get editbugs privs, yet.)
Well, I mean, in an ideal world we'd have some kind of triaging project
that worked. But we've tried that how many times now? :) Since there's
no active triage project, really I think 'everyone in QA gets triage
powers' is the second-best option.
(BTW, in case you're wondering about non-Fedora stuff: AIUI Red Hat
products in BZ are protected from Fedora contributors wielding editbugs
powers somehow or other. I don't think we're going to have Red Hat C*Os
coming down on us for causing their zillion-dollar bug to be sabotaged
or anything).
3. I have some experience with translator teams in the past. We also
used a group for giving people extra powers (revert translations and
such). I have a bad experience with free-to-apply groups. I spent a
lot of time explaining people that "no, you don't need to be in the
group just to translate software, this is for additional permissions,
and we can add you once you've been around for some time and see that
you do good work" over and over again. It helped us so much to have a
short clear description (explicitly stating that they can do any
translator work without being in this group, this is sooo important)
and having it invite-only (a lot of people don't read descriptions
when they see a big Join button). If someone is eligible to be added,
you usually know him, he knows you, and it's easy for him to ping you
and ask for a group membership. I advise here to do the same.
We can do something like that for sure, but yeah, my take is that I
wouldn't want it to be too much of a two-tier system.
I've stuck a meeting agenda item for the group membership stuff in for
Monday, we can chat about it there...maybe you could draft some specific
changes to the current group description texts?
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net