If I can chime in with another benefit - bug hunting tends to push you into exploring components you take for granted. You have no idea how useful that can be, not only in using the component, but identifying improvements and fixes not currently raised as issues. Let's not forget the "hunting" part of the exercise :). As Matthew said, you'll get a lot of insight into QA and will certainly learn to appreciate the work of people fixing bugs more regularly.
Pádraic Brady http://blog.astrumfutura.com http://www.survivethedeepend.com OpenID Europe Foundation Irish Representative ________________________________ From: Matthew Weier O'Phinney <matt...@zend.com> To: fw-general@lists.zend.com Sent: Friday, September 18, 2009 4:15:51 PM Subject: [fw-general] Bug Hunt Days! Greetings, all! Four years ago today, I boarded a plane to San Jose, CA, to start work at my new employer, Zend Technologies, Ltd., as a PHP Developer on the newly formed eBiz team. Since I first started at Zend, I've been contributing to Zend Framework, with gradually more areas of responsibility and community involvement. My first contributions were Zend_XmlRpc_Server and Zend_Server_Reflection, and code audits/refactoring of Zend_Json and Zend_Mail. I monitored the mailing lists and answered questions where I could, but my first really big involvement in the project occurred in the fall of 2006, when Andi asked me to spearhead a rewrite of the MVC layer, a project I did in parallel with my official work duties maintaining and expanding the zend.com CMS system. It was a task I could never have accomplished without the excellent collaboration of many, many contributors and users. Yesterday, we took a step to regain some of that spirit by beginning the first monthly bug hunt days. All told, contributors closed 53(!) issues -- and the momentum continued well after I logged off for the day! If you were unable to join us yesterday, I encourage you to hop onto the #zftalk.dev IRC channel on Freenode and join the group of lively contributors there today. If you can't make it today -- join us next month on the third Thursday and Friday (the 15th and 16th) when we'll do it all over again! I've heard a number of people asking if we could hold at least one bug hunt day on the weekend or in the evening. We may explore this possibility in the coming months (I have some reservations; since my team are all FTE, I don't want to make work requirements in their off-hours!). However, one of the reasons often cited is that interested developers can't get time from their employers to join, and to this, I offer the following arguments to offer your boss(es): * Helping squash bugs in ZF will help your *work* projects, by ensuring quality code upstream. Ultimately, this will likely save your company money. * How much money does Zend Framework save your company? By using a framework, your developers are not needing to create their own low-level components to handle mundane tasks such as routing, validation and filtering, web service requests, etc. Allocating resources to help maintain ZF is a way to "pay" for the convenience ZF offers you. * How much value does ZF add to your offerings? For instance, what features on your sites or client sites do you offer simply because ZF has a component for it? (e.g., Twitter live-stream, GData-app integration, localization, etc.) Again, consider allocating resources to help maintain ZF as a way of saying "thank you" to the many contributors who have made these features possible. * Developers who help in the bug hunt likely are gaining important skills in quality assurance -- all bugfixes need to be accompanied by associated unit tests and/or documentation. Consider this important professional development for your developers. Just because we will be having official bug hunt days monthly doesn't mean your contributions need to be limited to those windows, either! Hopefully, many of you will discover how much fun and satisfaction comes with closing issue reports and continue the trend in the days and weeks following! I hope to see as many of you as possible helping out today and in future months -- the esprit de corps I witnessed yesterday was phenomenal, and it's representative of the best that open source has to offer. Keep up the good work, everyone -- and THANK YOU to everyone who helps make this framework better each and every day! -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney Project Lead | matt...@zend.com Zend Framework | http://framework.zend.com/
