Out of sight out of mind
Andrew Edwards via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jun 15 08:37:22 PDT 2014
Observe the following truths:
1) Issue tricking and resolution are kept separate in our community
2) That which is not visible garners no attention
Presently, we file bugs/issues through issues.dlang.org, the maintenance
of which is no small task and is certainly appreciated. However, it is
an environment completely detached from where the actual work is
performed. As such, it breeds neglect on the part of the developers: not
because they do not care, but rather because they do not see.
Take issue #143 for instance. It is the oldest open issue on the DLang
Issue Tracking System. Submitted by Jarrett Billingsley on May 17, 2006,
it received one comment two days later but was ignored for four years
before Michal Minich made the second comment. Another two years went by
before Martin Nowak addressed the issue, which Walter promptly reverted
(reason unknown). The end result? Eight years flew by and the issue
remains unresolved.
This happens because we have two separate systems (one tracking
problems, another tracking the resolution), both of which compete for
the same precious and extremely limited resource: the volunteer time of
developers.
Already proven a valuable resource, GitHub offers the tools necessary to
resolve this problem. The "issues" feature (not currently activated for
any D-Programming-Language repo) allows us to set milestones (with due
dates), assign tasks, and create and apply labels (multiple where required).
Observe the following:
https://github.com/AndrewEdwards/druntime/issues?state=open
Note how quickly you can see the total number of open issues, traverse
to any category, and identify what is important for a given milestone.
We can even track our progress toward a specific milestone in seconds,
or which issues we created or was assigned to us.
By using this feature, we will eliminate the fire and forget problem
currently observed with Bugzilla. We will be able to automatically link
resolution to issue, by a mere mention of the issue number within the
resolution. Issues become far more visible and, consequently, are not so
easily forgotten.
A complete win in my book.
-Andrew
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