[openstack-dev] Encouraging first-time contributors through bug tags/reviews

Sean Dague sean at dague.net
Mon Nov 30 11:55:39 UTC 2015


On 11/25/2015 03:22 PM, Shamail wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>> On Nov 25, 2015, at 11:05 PM, Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
>>
>> Excerpts from Shamail Tahir's message of 2015-11-25 09:15:54 -0500:
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> Andrew Mitry recently shared a medium post[1] by Kent C. Dobbs which
>>> discusses how one open-source project is encouraging contributions by new
>>> open-source contributors through a combination of a special tag (which is
>>> associated with work that is needed but can only be completed by someone
>>> who is a first-time contributor) and helpful comments in the review phase
>>> to ensure the contribution(s) eventually get merged.
>>>
>>> While reading the article, I immediately thought about our
>>> low-hanging-fruit bug tag which is used for a very similar purpose in "bug
>>> fixing" section of  the "how to contribute" page[2].  The low-hanging-fruit
>>> tag is used to identify items that are generally suitable for first-time or
>>> beginner contributors but, in reality, anyone can pick them up.
>>>
>>> I wanted to propose a new tag (or even changing the, existing, low-hanging
>>> fruit tag) that would identify items that we are reserving for first-time
>>> OpenStack contributors (e.g. a patch-set for the item submitted by someone
>>> who is not a first time contributor would be rejected)... The same article
>>> that Andrew shared mentions using an "up-for-grabs" tag which also
>>> populates the items at up-for-grabs[3] (a site where people looking to
>>> start working on open-source projects see entry-level items from multiple
>>> projects).  If we move forward with an exclusive tag for first-timers then
>>> it would be nice if we could use the up-for-grabs tag so that OpenStack
>>> also shows up on the list too.  Please let me know if this change should be
>>> proposed elsewhere, the tags are maintained in launchpad and the wiki I
>>> found related to bug tags[4] didn't indicate a procedure for submitting a
>>> change proposal.
>>
>> I like the idea of making bugs suitable for first-timers more
>> discoverable. I'm not sure we need to *reserve* any bugs for any class
>> of contributor. What benefit do you think that provides?
> I would have to defer to additional feedback here... 
> 
> My own perspective from when I was doing my first contribution is that it was hard to find active "low-hanging-fruit" items.  Most were already work-in-progress or assigned.

This was a direct consequence of us dropping the auto-abandoning of old
code reviews in gerrit. When a review is abandoned the bug is flipped
back to New instead of In Progress.

I found quite often people go and gobble up bugs assigning them to
themselves, but don't make real progress on them. Then new contributors
show up, and don't work on any of those issues because our tools say
someone is already on top of it.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net



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