Plasma Bug Workflow BOF

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Friday, June 22, 2012 15:11:42 Myriam Schweingruber wrote:
> What needs to be understood is that all code can have bugs, that is
> only natural and nobody will deny that. But that also means that we
> should thrive to make the code better, and IMHO to some extend a
> developer should feel responsible for the code s/he commits and also
> take care of the bugs that are found.
> 
> While I understand that nobody likes pressure it should also be
> understood the perception from the other side: developers not even
> looking at bugs in their own code are perceived as arrogant and
> uncooperative. With the current situation the politics of putting the
> head in the ground or just walking away with the "I don't have time"
> wave is not going to help, so efforts need to be done on all sides.

You seem to be implying that putting pressure onto people is going to change 
this: a fallacy. It actually works the other way round. If you put this kind 
of pressure onto people, they'll turn around and go elsewhere, so you're 
actually decreasing the resources available to fix bugs. It's counter-
intuitive, so easy to make this mistake. Yet, it's still a mistake.

I agree with your goals, I disagree with "put pressure onto people" being a 
valid way to deal with that -- it's detrimental to motivation and counter-
productive to our shared goal, which is improving the quality of our software.

I've elaborated on ways to make developers care, but now I doubt that message 
actually got through, so let me try to repeat it as concise as possible:

- respect and being friendly are paramoumt to everything
- don't put blame or extra pressure onto the people who are already doing the 
  work
- don't try making decisions about priorities for others, instead provide 
  information that makes it easier to prioritize, but accept others priorities
- developers handle chopped up pieces better than drinking from the firehose 
  (your regression lists are awesome in that respect, also aids prioritizing)
- bug squashing, like most other activities in Free software needs to happen 
  bottom-up
- we collaborate instead of dictating and blaming

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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