Our first bugday on January 29th over reports that had not been changed in over a year went well. There was a small turnout, but it was fun and a good learning experience. I sent out a summary to wikitech-l. We addressed about 30 of the original 250 reports (summary of bug reports acted on). This included retesting reports to see if they were still valid for newer versions that have been released. If we could not reproduce the issue or needed more information, we left comments to that effect on the reports. Since these are older reports, we planned to close them after 3 weeks of non response. I spent some time yesterday closing some of those reports. A number of the reports were closed before I checked yesterday. And all of the closed reports can be reopened if it is discovered this issue still exists.
As mentioned in the summary sent to wikitech-l, we wanted to have a clearer landing page. For the first bug day, the only source of information for the bug day was the bug management Triage page. I was able to address this with the last bugday, which was last Tuesday (2-19). We focused on open bugs in the Git/Gerrit component. I coordinated with Chad, who lead the recent update of Gerrit, and he established the focus for this bug day would be on upstream reports. I created a page listing the ‘Who,’ ‘What,’ ‘When,’ and ‘Where.’ I liked that we had a dedicated page for this bugday, because we had a number of upstream links, like release notes and the Gerrit bug tracker, that would have cluttered up the triage page. The dedicated page allows us to post more information, and after the bug day we can archive the list of reports that we acted on and associated comments.
During the bugday, we addressed about 25 of 70 reports. We didn’t close as many reports as the first bugday, but we posted status updates and linked to upstream bugs. I spent a lot of time looking for upstream bugs reports that match the problems described in our reports. I’m not very familiar with Gerrit, so I was learning as I triaged. I have not had the opportunity to submit a change, but I am looking for one.
I’m working on a couple of blog posts to submit to the Wikimedia blog. While drafting the posts I created a flowchart that illustrates the life cycle of a bug report. Andre helped me improve it, and I’ll be using it in my post. I welcome feedback or questions regarding the image. You can see the evolution of the image at this page of the original .svg file. There are some rendering bugs with .svg files on commons, however, so the image I’ll be using in the report and the one above is the .png version.
As for my proposal, I’ve talked with the fabulous Liz from Mozilla about their feedback channels. She gave me a lot to think about and look over. Andre also contacted a friend at Ubuntu to learn more about their feedback channels. I’ll be creating a high level diagram of their channels, and also looking at other open source projects that were recently suggested.
I’m thoroughly enjoying the range of work I get to to do, but I think I need to be careful not to get pulled too far off-track. This post has helped center me, though.
As a side note, I just wanted to point more people to Elodieunderglass’ [GIRLS IN SCIENCE] posts. It’s not technology focused but has interesting points.