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A few quick notes:
* I at least _see_ every bug, though during busy times (like conferences) I can get behind. I also don't necessarily comment on everything myself, so bugs that aren't getting attention may lack feedback. :(
* Things that don't get immediate attention often do end up not being touched again until either someone agitates or someone happens to find it and feel like fixing it themselves.
* I'd like us to get on a standard of ensuring that all bugs new / patches get some sort of comment within X days -- either a fix, a rejection, or an explanation why it's going on the back burner. This means getting some basic metrics in place, and some regular reporting of patches falling towards the long end of the limit.
* A few times I've experimented with "bug days" grabbing folks on IRC to find bugs of interest and either get patches made or existing patches reviewed and committed. They've been pretty good, but we haven't quite gotten to making them a regular thing yet. I'd definitely like to get that going again!
* As we have more "directable" resources (more people on staff or contracting), I'll start to have some more ability to specifically assign certain types of bugs to people... but it's always more fun when people take on bugs that interest them. :)
- -- brion
Brianna Laugher wrote:
Hi,
I'm interested in what is the current "bug report management" going on with MediaWiki at the moment, and if it can be improved. Bugzilla is purported to be the method of communication between the Wikimedia project communities and the MW developers. But I find it fairly unsatisfying because I feel like when I file bug reports/feature requests, I have no confidence that they will even be read, let alone considered as a community request, responded to, placed in a roadmap or given a developer-POV priority. I feel like the only I can have any guarantee of the software feature I want being considered, is to befriend individual developers and try and convince them about my idea. Obviously, this doesn't scale well.
http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2005/11/triage.html Maybe it would help to try and encourage developers and techie types to do more (or any?) bug triaging, eventually leading to individuals or groups responsible for triaging all bugs entered within particular Product & Component values? Extension authors are obviously responsible for triaging their own extensions' bugs, but especially for the Wikimedia and MediaWiki products I think this should be helpful.
I couldn't find any mention of this kind of bug report management or bug triaging on mediawiki.org, so I am guessing whatever is done at the moment is fairly ad-hoc.
It is difficult to "see" activity on bugzilla, a la Recentchanges. (I guess if you are subscribed to wikibugs-l you see everything...) for example there is no straightforward way (ie link from the mainpage) to see the most recently entered bugs, or the most recently closed bugs, or the highest priority still-open bugs. These are probably fairly straightforward reports -- maybe it would be good to link them on the bugzilla front page?
If activity on bugzilla was more visible, it would be easier to thank people who spend time on bug triaging. (an otherwise extremely thankless task!)
Another idea would be to have regular bug triage days/events, like maybe one weekend a month, and just publicise them on here and mediawiki.org.
I guess I would also like to know more generally, what can Wikimedia communities do to communicate their tech priorities to y'all more clearly? What can we do better to get clearer feedback? (Even hearing a "no" at least gives one closure. :)) Is Bugzilla the best and only method? Is it helpful if a community appoints a 'tech request manager' who acts as a filter/gateway between the developers and the wiki community?
thanks, Brianna [[user:pfctdayelise]]