Hello, all!
The clean-up party that took place this week was great fun and great
success. Unconfirmed issues were reduced by 130 in 24 hours.
Here is more details:
How did we do it?
As I wrote in my invitation mail, we did not spend too much time in
planning and making rules that trigger discussions or scare off people.
The motto was "Get things done and learn underway". And I believe that
we did both.
At the beginning, Thorsten Ziehm set up a WIKI page to give the
participants an easy entry to the issue list links:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Issue_hunting_party
This URL was put into the channel topic (thanks to Mechtilde) so that
everybody in the chat had it at hand all the time.
After a brief welcome we just started "throwing issue IDs into the race"
and started to exchange thoughts and information before someone
"processed" the issue. For this purpose, the "IZBot" plug-in is a great
help by replying Issue data when reading "issue XYZXY" in anyone’s
posting. Then all can read the summary in the chat and see if it is
worth to join reproduction efforts, talks, querying for helping hints
and so on. OR skip this one and have a look at another issue, throwing
its ID into the round when questions arise or other opinions were needed.
Later we used IZBot to select "random issues" that match the party
focus. This "issue lottery" was great fun for all because it confronted
us all with issues we would probably not have chosen at first (thanks to
Cloph for this!)
The time zones of this globe...
We decided to make a 24h party so that people from all over the world
could participate without loosing too much sleep. From what I saw on the
channel list, we had participants from Japan, China, France, The
Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany.
Most traffic took place from 11:00 until 00:30. No wonder, because most
people that were actively involved were in European time zones (DE, FR,
CH, NL).
From 00:30 to 06:30 it was a not-too-busy night.
Around 06:30, the first SUNnies got back in and many people re-joined
the party until its end at 11:00 on Wednesday.
Where did we get?
In these 24 hours, 130 formerly "unconfirmed" issues were processed
(mostly closed as fixed or duplicates, or confirmed and reassigned).
This is a valuable success.
What did we learn?
We sliced off 10% of the "unconfirmed cake" (1300 issues on Tuesday). A
little more detailed: Framework -27, Writer -74, Calc/Chart -10 Graphics
-5, Base -8. So the majority of issues proceeded were Writer issues.
This clearly shows that we should consider to repeat similar events. And
it shows that the “Application barrier” should be disregarded in future
events. The Office has several applications with different “challenges”
each, but an issue description is a good entry point to get to know an
application people “feared to deal with” before. And having
“specialists” in the chat brought knowledge transfer as a welcome
side-effect of this party.
We surely did redundant work. But that was a good thing in this case.
When several people read, riddle about and manage to reproduce or nail
down the same issue, it is a group experience as well as a very fast
"help desk". As a matter of fact, everyone has a different knowledge
background about platforms, applications, whatever is needed to track
down an issue. This is the most valuable power in such a team effort.
All people involved did willingly share their experience with all
others. So beside the "numbers", we "produced" knowledge and fun for all
involved people.
Is there a better outcome of a team effort than "numbers, fun and
valuable knowledge"? - I don’t think so.
So we will repeat similar events, that is for sure. We are still
thinking of a feasible frequency. My first idea was to do it "The first
Tuesday, every month" - This is much easier to remember than something
like "08/05, 09/02, 10/07, 11/04, 12/02" isn't it?
Since we learned from what we did, we will do it again, so stay tuned!
At this point, I would like to thank all of you who supported this
party. The "issue eaters" as well as the "silent readers" who just
joined the chat without writing actively. At least, this showed that we
triggered world-wide attention with this party.
Comments are welcome.
Have a nice day!
Stefan Baltzer
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