Thoughts about a better Quality Management process for Plasma

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, January 14, 2013 23:03:03 David Edmundson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> > we need some people who use master, but aren't responsible for writing
> > (much) code, doing this work. otherwise those writing the code will
> > simply get nothing done.
> 
> I completely disagree with this. To me this reads as "we'll do the fun
> stuff, other people should tidy up after us".

or, given a sufficient volume of bugs and a sufficient volume of other tasks to 
take care of, it becomes impossible for the same people to manage all of it.

i enjoy fixing bugs and even doing some triage (you can look at the commit and 
bugzilla histories to see that quite plainly), but it simply does not scale to 
the size of Plasma Workspaces to have the same people ticking items off the 
TODO list, fixing the bugs, doing project coordination, working on public 
communication, etc. etc. *and* doing a significant portion of bug triage.

fixing other people's bugs, reviewing patches, coordinating metings, etc isn't 
fun stuff either .. yet we do that stuff too fairly willingly. seems to me that 
we face an unwaranted devaluation of the process of bug triage.

we used to feel similarly about artwork and usability, and we didn't fix that 
by having everyone do artwork and usability .. :)

> No-one is going to want
> to do that and no-one will. Which is the state we're in now.

iow people's attitude towards quality efforts sucks. they think it's "not fun" 
and not important so they don't do it.

if "fun" is measured by the awesomeness of a release, would that change 
things?

> New developers copy the senior devs who lead the project. If you
> triage, they'll triage, if you don't they won't. 

i remember back when Ann-Marie commented that they've never seen a team who 
chewed through bug reports in such volume day after day as we did. so: no.

> You don't want people
> aspiring to be "too important to look at bugs".

there are two questionable assumptions here imho:

* tasks like bug triage have little intrinsic value
* everyone must do a bit of everything, otherwise nothing has value

the idea that each person must be doing the same thing as every other person 
to give every task value is rubbish. specialization has benefits in terms of 
skill level and efficienciy. people don't scale to very large #s of different 
types of task, and people have different skill sets and time availability.

if you don't do some particular task, that doesn't mean it isn't important. 
does the fact that neither you nor i work on kwin make kwin unimportant?

i'd suggest we focus on treating each other well while focusing on the 
results. then we can each find ways to effectively contribute to that. that 
might mean you don't do the same tasks as me, and vice versa. if that leads to 
a better set of results, we should all be rather happy about that.

i'd really like to avoid accepting notions such as "only do what senior devs 
do" and "some tasks, while important to results, lack value" within our 
community.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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