Plasma Bug Workflow BOF

[David Edmundson]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.

This "pressure" can be in the form of encouragement, organisation and
good examples.  This has to come from the top-down of the project, as
everyone respects (and therefore copies) their elders.

It's counterintuitive, 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
>

I trust you'll be at the BOF? Martin G is doing an amazing job with a
very difficult product with regards to bugs and is clearly a
bug-wizard. We've adopted several of Martin's suggestions in KTp along
with some of our own ideas (which I'll be happy to share) and for us
bugs aren't a chore, they're a useful part of the workflow.

No point discussing this on the mailing list anymore - see you in 2 days :)

> Cheers,
> --
> sebas
>
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