On 24.10.2012 21:08, Rob Weir wrote:
As you have probably noticed, I'm engaged in a variety of initiatives
to grow the community, bring in more volunteers, etc. One additional
piece that I think would be useful is to add a new field to Bugzilla
to indicate the difficulty level of the bug. Of course, this will
often not be known. But in some cases, we do know, and where we do
know we can indicate this.
What this allows us to do is then have search filters that return only
open easy bugs. These are ideal for new developer volunteers on the
project who are looking for items that match their lesser familiarity
with the code. It also allows a developer to step up to more
challenging bugs over time.
FWIW there is a keyword "easy2dev" http://s.apache.org/easy2dev_open
that was used to mark "easy to develop" issues.
If there are no objections, I'll add a new field to Bugzilla called
"cf_difficulty_level", and which a drop down UI with the following
choices:
UNKNOWN (default)
TRIVIAL
EASY
MODERATE
HARD
WIZARD
(I'm certainly open to variations on the names)
Using a separate field and getting rid of the easy2dev keyword is a good
idea. I agree with Regina on the level naming and I also like Dennis'
logarithmic scale idea.
I'd also like to point out that there are several dimensions to it:
- the difficulty from a language/debugging-skills standpoint
- the difficulty for any developer new to the codebase
E.g. UNO is rarely used outside of the OpenOffice ecosystem. Using UNO's
multiple inheritance feature to write alternatives to existing old-style
interfaces might be a very challenging task for newcomers but a trivial
task to someone familiar with these concepts.
Herbert
