On 9/22/15 4:41 PM, Richard Newman wrote:
One of the problems we face with fatfennec and other big projects is
that it's difficult for volunteers (and paid contributors, for that
matter!) to make the jump from [good-first-bug]s to the harder/less well
specified/less approachable bugs.
That's compounded by over-committed senior folks not finding the time to
do enough work to break own those big hairy bugs.
We also tend to take an all-or-nothing approach to fixing bugs, so those
difficult projects tend to sit.
I'd like to get to a place where 'success' wasn't synonymous with
'RESOLVED': where we can leverage our contributor base to incrementally
move some of these bugs forward, whether that's by doing investigation
(almost triage!), breaking down meta bugs, or even writing up better
summaries.
I admit it's my tendency to not consider my own contributions successful
unless I've written a patch and it's landed on moz-central. But then
again, a comment like this is a super useful contribution (to me as
someone who might try to fix that) even though it didn't result in any
code written: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=887517#c8>
I wonder how we can make people feel recognized and valued for this kind
of non-greppable-in-a-codebase work? I don't actually know.
That is: can our contributors help our contributors?
One thing that comes to mind is what we try to do on webcompat.com/Tech
Evangelism bugs. We have a set of whiteboard strings (and labels on
GitHub) like [needsdiagnosis], [needscontact], [contactready] so in
theory if someone isn't skilled at debugging minified JS or whatever
they might be really good at finding points of contact for a given
website and that's how they contribute. (But we have a lot of work to do
to make people aware of this and grow our own community of contributors...).
--
Mike Taylor
Web Compat, Mozilla
_______________________________________________
mobile-firefox-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mobile-firefox-dev
