Open Stack

Excerpts from sean roberts's message of 2015-11-30 07:57:54 -0800:
> How about:
> First timers assign a bug to a mentor and the mentor takes responsibility
> for the first timer learning from the bug to completion.

That would mean the learning process is different from what we want the
regular process to be.

If the problem is identifying "In Progress" bugs that are actually not
being worked on, then let's figure out a way to make that easier.
sdague's point about the auto-abandon process may help. We could query
gerrit for "stale" reviews that would have met the old abandon
requirements and that refer to bugs, for example. Using that
information, someone could follow-up with the patch owner to see if it
is actually abandoned, before changing the bug status or encouraging the
owner to abandon the patch.

> 
> Per project, a few people volunteer themselves as mentors. As easy as
> responding to [project][mentor] emails.
> 
> On Monday, November 30, 2015, Sean Dague <sean at dague.net> wrote:
> 
> > On 11/25/2015 03:22 PM, Shamail wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > >> On Nov 25, 2015, at 11:05 PM, Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com
> > <javascript:;>> 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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