On Apr 2, 2013, at 3:21 PM, Noah Slater <nsla...@apache.org> wrote: > Dear community, > > Right now, we have people who are regularly going through JIRA and triaging > tickets. This is totally fantastic, and a very valuable activity for the > project. (So thank you!) But I also notice that specific individuals are > being assigned to the tickets in the process. > > This is a form of "cookie licking". The analogy is that if you fancy a > cookie, but you're too hungry right now, you take a lick of it so nobody > else can touch it. This is an anti-pattern and we should try to avoid it. > > In general, I would say we should only be assigning a ticket to ourselves, > and we should only be doing that when we actually intend to sit down and > work on it. > > If we have people going through and saying "well, this is clearly Joe's > area" or "this is clearly Fred's area" then that is a great way to make > sure that those areas remain "Joe's area" or "Fred's area" or whatever. > Which is unhealthy for the project. > > So what I would suggest is that we consider changing the way we work here. > > Ticket triage might change so that tickets are put on to component > backlogs. And engineers can switch from grabbing tickets of their "assigned > to me" report, and start looking at the "Foo feature backlog" report > instead. Selecting a ticket and assigning it *to themselves* when they are > *starting work on it*. > > (This would then take the ticket off the component backlog. So the backlog > report would only display tickets that were unassigned and available to > grab.) > > This would mean that all this valuable ticket triage work we're doing is > something that can benefit everyone in the project (not just people who are > already known for their contributions) and will hopefully open the > development workflow to people who are just starting out with the project, > or want to get their toes wet. > > In fact, when someone comes to us and asks "how can I contribute" we can > point them at these backlogs and say "well, just grab a ticket off one of > these queues, assign it to yourself, and start working on it!" We could > make use of a "difficulty" field too, so you could sort by difficulty, and > grab one of the "easy", "medium", or "hard" tickets. > > Thoughts? > > -- > NS
Hi Noah, I know where you are coming from here, I would just like to point out that a quick JIRA search for Unassgined ticket returns 392 tickets up for grabs (out of 641 open tickets). That's 61% of our total tickets that are Unassigned. In some ways and to keep things simple, anyone should feel free to grab any ticket they think they can work on and hopefully close. No need for buckets, priorities or difficulty rating. Just grab it. -Sebastien
