Blame games does not fix faulty processes. You fix a sinkhole by figuring out where the water comes from and where it goes.
Why do we have bugs that isn't handled for years? Why is it easier to get a new feature than fixing an old bug?
Google had a problem with unfixed bugs, and they started identifying the involved developers each time the build was broken. That is pretty harsh, but what if devs somehow was named when their bugs were mentioned? What if there were some kind of public statistic? How would the devs react to being identified with a bug? Would they fix the bug, or just be mad about it? Devs at some of Googles teams got mad, but in the end the code were fixed. Take a look at "GTAC 2013 Keynote: Evolution from Quality Assurance to Test Engineering" [1]
What if we could show information from the bugs in Phabricator in a "tracked" template at other wiki-projects, identifying the team responsible and perhaps even the dev assigned to the bug? Imagine the creds the dev would get when the bug is fixed! Because it is easy to loose track of pages with "tracked" templates we need some other means to show this information, and our "public monitor" could be a special page with the same information.
We say we don't want voting over bugs, but by saying that we refuse getting stats over how many users a specific bug hits, and because of that we don't get sufficient information (metrics) to make decisions about specific bugs. Some bugs (or missing features) although changes how users are doing specific things, how do we handle that?
What if users could give a "this hits me too" from a "tracked" template. That would give a very simple metric on how important it is to fix a problem. To make this visible to the wiki-communities the special page could be sorted on this metric. Of course the devs would have completely different priorities, but this page would list the wiki-communities priorities.
It would be a kind of blame game, but it would also give the devs an opportunity to get sainthood by fixing annoying bugs.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyOHJ4GR4iU from 32:20
On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 11:49 PM Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, 2019-03-13 at 21:01 +0100, John Erling Blad wrote:
This is like an enormous sinkhole, with people standing on the edge, warning about the sinkhole. All around people are saying "we must do something"! Still the sinkhole slowly grows larger and larger. People placing warning signs "Sinkhole ahead". Others notifying neighbors about the growing sinkhole. But nobody does anything about the sinkhole itself.
And repeating the same thing over and over again while repeatedly ignoring requests to be more specific won't help either...
andre
Andre Klapper | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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