Wikimedia Apps/OTRS

Hi!

I'm Dan, and I'm the product owner for the Mobile Apps Team at the Wikimedia Foundation. What that means is that I am the one ultimately responsible for making sure the Wikipedia app meets the needs of our users.

I'm reaching out to you all because you all indicated your willingness to volunteer in the Mobile OTRS queues. This email will explain some of the basics to get you started.

Our OTRS queues get a lot of email. These emails fall in to one of two classes: Feedback emails should be responded to the same as any other email in OTRS. Thank the user for their email and talk to them about it! If it's a feature request or a bug report, you can file it in Phabricator against either the iOS app or Android app projects. Please do a quick search to see if there's any similar feature requests or issues first.
 * Feedback emails from users
 * Automated crash reports

Automated crash reports are sent only to the Android queue right now. They consist of a stack trace, which is a description of the state of the app when it crashed. These stack traces help us reproduce the issue the user encountered, so that we can fix it. They also contain some other metadata, and sometimes a comment from the user (if they provided one). The best thing to do with these is to either file a new task in Phabricator for that kind stack trace if one already exists, or add the report to another, similar stack trace. You'll build up intuition about what a 'similar' stack trace is over time; most of the time (but not always), the first line of the stack trace itself is the only thing that really matters.

If you don't know the answer to a question that a user asks you, don't panic! Simply thank them for their feedback and tell them you'll pass the feedback onto the team. Then please contact me on IRC (#wikimedia-mobile on Freenode) with their question. I'm under the name of Deskana and am routinely available from 10:30am until 6:30pm SF time, and then often sporadically available until around 10:00pm SF time. Failing that, send me an email with the question.

If you have any other questions about OTRS, you can ask the other two active volunteers, Alex and Florian, who go by Krenair and FlorianSW on IRC. They're very experienced with the process and would be happy to answer your questions.

Good luck, and thanks again for volunteering!