[TYPO3-dev] The future of Bug Days

[François Suter]

Hi all,

We have been having Bug Days monthly for most of the last 3 years. Some 
have been wildly successful, others far less so. Recently the tendency 
has been toward reduced participation and I feel like it's going down 
the drain and that the concept needs a change.

Indeed the recent Bug Days could be compared to a placebo: the 
additional amount of bugs fixed/reviewed during the day is not 
significantly higher than on any other day. I think that as long as a 
Bug Day does not produce a significant increase in activity, it is not 
relevant.

My personal impression is that the Bug Days have become routine. Most 
people are aware of them happening and think that they'll participate 
next time, when they have more availability. It's easy to dismiss such a 
regular event. There also have been complaints about the Bug Days 
happening on Fridays when most people are working. Some manage to free 
themselves, others not.

Given the poor recent results, I don't feel very motivated about 
organizing the Bug Days anymore, but I also think that it would be 
fruitless to just hand over the current concept to someone else. It 
wouldn't work out any better and the new person in charge would probably 
tire even more quickly than me.

I'm thus starting this discussion to try and come up with a new concept 
for the Bug Days. The topic was already discussed during yesterday's 
Development Meeting (which I couldn't attend), and here are the ideas 
that were already floated (full protocol at [1]):

- companys should be mentioned, that they set their developers free for 
the bug days
- Hosted bugdays: Maybe they should be revived, was fun and a good 
motivator, yet more organisational overhead
- Idea: Arrange bug days / coding nights during TYPO3 Camps
- maybe move bugday communication to big blue button as well
with an open channel for the whole day and a real voice meeting after 
lunch time (makes sense when people can leave normal work a bit earlier 
on Friday and use their afternoon)
- define "mentors" for bugdays that "steer" the participants

And here are some more of my own ideas:

- lower the frequency, but make it a bug-fixing period rather than a 
single day. My idea would be to do something over an extended week-end, 
starting on Friday and ending on Sunday. This would allow more people to 
participate. We would arrange those sprints so that as many Core Team 
members as possible are available.
- assemble one-day, ad hoc teams. We already have quite a few teams, but 
a true team requires organization, meetings, protocols, etc. My idea 
would be to assemble teams around a given topic for a single day. Of 
course the same team could gather again, but it wouldn't be an official, 
permanent team. Example: there recently was an long discussion about the 
new EM. Creating an EM team would probably be overkill, but I could 
imagine defining a day where people interested in the topic would be 
free to devote themselves fully to the EM, making sure the most 
important people (e.g. Steffen Kamper in this case) can participate.

Now it's your turn to speak up :-)

Consider this a brainstorming, come out with what you like and don't 
like, and with any ideas that you have, even wild ones. Please refrain 
from criticizing ideas, every input is valuable in a brainstorming phase.

Cheers

-- 
Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch

[1] 
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-core/wiki/Status_Meeting_2011-07-21