dormant bugs and our perception

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 15:54 -0600, Jon Stanley wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2008 2:25 PM, Elliot Lee <sopwith at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > > What we need is a leader.  Someone who wants to step up and say "we will
> > > have Fedora bug days every Friday (or whatever) from this time to this
> > > time, and I will be in #fedora-qa doing it myself, and teaching everyone
> > > else who wants to learn."
> 
> Joined fedora-advisory-board late (after this was cross-posted from
> fedora-marketing where I started the thread), so I'm not sure who
> originally wrote this, but this is what I'm volunteering myself to do.
>  Fedora is not $DAYJOB for me, and I can't spend much time on it
> (depending on workload).  In the evenings and on weekends however,
> sign me up!  I'll teach anyone who wants to know what I know, and hope
> that others will do the same.

This is a leader's attitude.  Way to go!

> > I hink this is the heart of the problem (not the washing hair, the
> > thankless work bit...) The only person I can recall who was ever a
> > Rock Star Bug Triager was Kjartan Maraas for GNOME, and I think he did
> > it out of dedication rather than sheer enjoyment, because he had the
> > talent to work on a lot of other stuff as well.
> 
> Well, I'm not much of a developer (unless you count shell script-fu -
> then I'm a ninja), however I think that I've got what it takes to
> triage - an interest in doing it, time, and not really caring that
> it's a thankless job - most of what we do is, but it does have an
> impact.

The biggest impact of triage is that it gives the casual (or one-time)
contributor the feeling that their time was not wasted filing a bug to
begin with.  Making sure that a bug is fixed in N timeslices is not
nearly as important as making sure that the filer knows they're not
being ignored.  Every person who files a bug, gets completely ignored
for 6-12 months, and then gets fed up and goes away is a person who
carries that experience with them into their interactions with others.
Word of mouth is *powerful*.

> > . Fix incentives. Maybe it means point system for rewarding people,
> > maybe it means free FUDcon trips, maybe it means improved recognition,
> > maybe it means hiring someone.
> 
> If it would help I was thinking of trying to make my way to FUDcon
> Raleigh to further this cause - I think it may be premature, though.
> I live in NYC, so airfare is cheap still.
> 
> > . Figure out what part of triaging /is/ enjoyable, and articulate it
> > well in a call for contributors.
> 
> Hmm, good question - the good feeling that you're making a difference? :P

People who can get by on just those good feelings are worth their weight
in gold!  It would be nice to have something else in the hopper for
them, though.  I like the idea of a points system that converts into
something tangible if desired, such as FUDCon travel allowance or other
goodies.

> > . Divide & conquer. Maybe you can't get five people working steadily
> > on bug triaging, but you might be able to get fifty Fedora
> > contributors triaging one bug per person per week. If you could write
> > a piece of infrastructure that decided which bugs needed triaging,
> > it'd be easy enough to have that infrastructure send an e-mail out
> > once a week to those fifty people ("Greg, Please triage bug #45678")
> > and track who was actually doing their part. You may want to wash your
> > hair on Fridays, but don't tell me you wouldn't be willing to triage
> > one bug a week...?
> 
> I think we can use bugzilla here.  All bugs begin life in the NEW
> state.  Perhaps if we just set them to ASSIGNED after triaging, and
> alter the definition of that state, or maybe add a new state like
> UNCONFIRMED like mozilla.org has.  Other suggestions welcome.

After reading Matej's draft, it seems to me that ASSIGNED means a solid
developer commitment.  Committing developers without their knowledge is
not good, but maybe a "triage+" flag would be.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/advisory-board/attachments/20080104/f91d9e40/attachment.bin