dormant bugs and our perception

[John Poelstra]

Luke Macken said the following on 01/02/2008 06:25 PM Pacific Time:
> On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 01:24:49PM -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>> On Jan 2, 2008 1:14 PM, John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> Unlike others that have posted here, I am less optimistic that we can
>>> viably review and address all 13,000+ open bugs.  We need to do
>>> something drastic to clear the deck and start a process that insures
>>> that we don't end up in this hole again.  I think this huge backlog is
>>> one of the biggest psychological de-motivators we have!
>> I think you are right about clearing the deck as part of a re-launch
>> for a triaging inititive.
>>
>> I also think that now that we have bodhi and the bugs interfaces to
>> compliment what we have in bugzilla we have more to work with in terms
>> of workflow flexibility for different groups of people
>> (users,developers,triagers).
>>
>> Is there a way to possibly group bugs by SIG? So we can have specific
>> triagers associated with SIGs. triagers as a group are a team, but
>> then they also act as a liaison to each SIG which controls the
>> packaging and development of related of packages.  That way SIGs might
>> advertise their triager role to new contributors as a starting point,
>> but make a commitment to mentoring those people so that in 6 months
>> those people move on to handling more advanced roles in the SIG such
>> as package maintainer, and new triagers are found for the entry level
>> position.
> 
> For those who haven't realized it yet:  Fedora development does not scale.
> This won't change until we move away from our 1-to-1/1-to-many package
> maintainership model.  IMO, we need groups of people maintaining groups of
> packages.  SIGs are a nice idea in theory, but have yet to be fully wielded.
> 
> A great example of this concept in action can be found within the gentoo 
> community[0] 
> 
> AFAIK, we have a few groups of maintainers that handle bugs, ie:
> {anaconda,kernel,gecko}-maint, but I'm unaware of any policy/procedures
> behind them.  Having these groups per-SIG would definitely help get more eyes
> on our bugs, especially if we can allow for these sub-communities to thrive.
> 
> It also sounds like Will's QA Beats[1] have the same general idea behind it.
> Instead of encapsulating people at the bugzilla/QA level, why not form these
> groups at the distro-level, to allow for team-based: packaging, bug triaging,
> QA, docs, etc.. ?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 

This seems like a good idea.  How successful have the "QA Beats" been?

john