The Goldfish Chronicles

A follow-on from the ‘My day job…’ post. It seemed like a new context so I moved it to a new entry.

So much looking at JIRAs and Bugzillas has been educational, and has definitely changed my style in Commons. Spring’s is pretty impressive, they answer very quickly and politely. There are some less polite ones that are an eye opener too. Looking at Commons, it was pretty obvious that we were embarrassingly bad at replying to issues - some issues had been unanswered for years.

We (Commons) moved to JIRA, cleaned up a lot and are doing much better. Triage is cool - but too heavyweight for an open source project. My cut-down triage for Commons is to have 4 options for an issue coming in. It can go in this-version, it can go in next-version, it can be closed (wontfix etc) or it can be commented on, with the purpose being to choose one of the previous three states. It becomes easy to see what code needs to be done and what issues need to be evaluated; things feel much simpler to me.

A weekly email telling us issues that are unversioned (and thus unevaluated) is on my todo list. David Blevins has already given me the guts of a swizzle script for it. It should also be able to suggest to us when a version is ready for release. I also need to write something to parse the commons-user mbox and report on user emails that haven’t been answered. Need to keep the creative brain thinking eh?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.