Bug management/status

Last update on: 2012-02-29

2011-05-01
Mark Hershberger reached out to other open-source communities (like Mozilla) to look for best practices in bug management and workflow; he started to experiment with a new "unprioritized" value for the "priority" field. He has also been organizing weekly bug triage sessions at different times to allow for participation from different timezones.

2011-06-01
Mark Hershberger continued his efforts to watch, assign and resolve bugs, notably by leading the bug squashing sessions at the Berlin Hackathon; more than 50 bugs where closed. He also worked with Priyanka Dhanda to get meaningful reports and metrics out of bugzilla.

2011-07-01
Mark Hershberger continued to conduct bug triages to surface issues that require attention or decisions; in June, these meetings switched from phone to IRC to improve transparency and accessibility to the rest of the community. After helping developers wrap up the 1.17 tarball, Mark started looking at 1.18 bugs, and led a triage to narrow down the list of open bugs blocking deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 on Wikimedia Foundation sites. He also worked on several concerns raised by the community, such as enabling "International" numerals on Hindi wiki with Priyanka Dhanda's help, and right-to-left and extension bundling issues.

2011-07-25
Mark Hershberger continued to conduct bug triage sessions on IRC, some of which were focused on MediaWiki 1.18 blockers, thumbnails issues, caching and operations-related requests. With Sumana Harihareswara, he cleaned up default assignees in bugzilla in order for assignments to be more meaningful, which prompted a discussion on the wikitech-l list.

2011-08-31
Mark Hershberger held bug triage sessions on Mobile & PDF export/Collections. The bug triage page now lists past and upcoming triages, as well as notes and summaries when available.

2011-09-30
Mark Hershberger continued to hold thematic bug triage sessions; in September, those focused on UploadWizard, Internationalization and Wikibooks & Wikisource. A calendar of upcoming triages is now available. He also reached out to people directly by e-mail to remind them of FIXMEs that were assigned to them. An upcoming focus on his work will be the patches submitted via Bugzilla.

2011-10-31
Mark Hershberger continued to hold themed bug triage sessions; in October, those focused on Fundraiser engineering and the new Wikipedia Android app. Two ad-hoc triages, on shell requests and 1.18 regressions, happened during the New Orleans hackathon. Mark also worked with members of the "MediaWiki Core" group to better identify "highest priority" bugs in Bugzilla and continued to prioritize and respond to new bug reports.

2011-11-02
Sumana Harihareswara led a bug triage on non-MySQL databases (summary, raw notes).

2011-11-30
<section begin=2011-11-30 />In November, Mark Hershberger and Sumana Harihareswara led themed bug triage sessions focusing on non-MySQL databases, MediaWiki 1.18 bugs, and UploadWizard. A session was also dedicated to reviewing patches in bugzilla; volunteer Rusty Burchfield wrote a tool to check if the patches could be applied to trunk, and only 50 were not obsolete due to bitrot. Mark watched for bugs and comments on local village pumps following the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia sites. He also continued to prioritize bugs and find developers to address those of highest priority.<section end=2011-11-30 />

2011-12-31
<section begin=2011-12-31/>Mark Hershberger followed up on MediaWiki 1.18 bugs, and wrote a FAQ listing issues and offering solutions until 1.18.1 is released. Mark also continued to go through "highest priority" bugs, dealt with bugzilla vandalism, reviewed patches submitted in bugzilla, and held bug triages on MediaWiki 1.18 and Fundraising engineering.<section end=2011-12-31/>

2012-01-31
<section begin=2012-01-31/>In January, Mark Hershberger worked with developers to prepare for the (planned) 1.19 deployment in February. He worked with volunteers to launch the beta cluster and held a triage to review 1.19 deployment blockers. The beta cluster has already begun to show some promise with the bugs it has helped reveal.<section end=2012-01-31/>

2012-02-29
<section begin=2012-02-29/>Mark Hershberger has been using the 1.19 deployment cycle to work with on-wiki editors to find and fix bugs as the deployment cycle goes on. Through the connections that he makes, he hopes to use these relationships during future deployments to make them smoother.<section end=2012-02-29/>