Tagging issues in projects

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

I propose that we should be working with projects to encourage them to
"tag" issues in JIRA that are suitable for various types of
introductory activities. So, for example, we might have:

- mentor (indicating that this is a fairly major task for which a
mentor is available)
- entry (indicating that this is the kind of thing someone with
reasonable development skills can tackle whilst learning about the
project)
- non-tech (indicating that this is ideal for someone without fully
developed IT skills)

I'm assuming that we can add a suitable field to JIRA to accept these
"tags" and that we could then create filters to find them. We can then
point people looking for suitable projects towards these issues.

Initially I suggest we start with the projects we are
committers/mentors on. Once we have traction we can take it to the
wider ASF.


Thoughts?
Volunteers?

Ross

-- 
Ross Gardler

OSS Watch - supporting open source in education and research
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Ted Dunning <te...@gmail.com>]

I can help tagging JIRA's for Mahout, but I expect poor compliance by most
committers.  If we have a default tag of "unknown", then just having a few
people interested in helping can triage issues pretty quickly.  JIRA has
good bulk editing capabilities which would make this pretty easy to do.

On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org> wrote:

> Thoughts?
> Volunteers?
>



-- 
Ted Dunning, CTO
DeepDyve

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Benson Margulies <bi...@gmail.com>]

OK, I get it. Maybe the mentor taxonomy is more important, then. Looks
like the goal here is, across lots of projects, to tag off some JIRAs
that these people could tackle.

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Ross Gardler
<ro...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2009/12/4 Benson Margulies <bi...@gmail.com>:
>> Very few new people ever have shown up just randomly looking for
>> things to do. They generally have bees in their hats on particular
>> subjects, and set to work on them. So this field hasn't gotten a lot
>> of exercise.
>
> I think this is true for all projects, but here at comdev we will be
> actively engaging people who are not drawn to the project to scratch
> an itch, but rather to learn about open development/Apache Way. The
> goal is not to change the way projects engage with their communities,
> but to make it easier for random wanderers to find something
> sufficiently interesting to look at.
>
> Ross
>

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Ross Gardler <ro...@googlemail.com>]

2009/12/4 Benson Margulies <bi...@gmail.com>:
> Very few new people ever have shown up just randomly looking for
> things to do. They generally have bees in their hats on particular
> subjects, and set to work on them. So this field hasn't gotten a lot
> of exercise.

I think this is true for all projects, but here at comdev we will be
actively engaging people who are not drawn to the project to scratch
an itch, but rather to learn about open development/Apache Way. The
goal is not to change the way projects engage with their communities,
but to make it easier for random wanderers to find something
sufficiently interesting to look at.

Ross

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Ross Gardler <ro...@googlemail.com>]

2009/12/4 Kathey Marsden <km...@sbcglobal.net>:
> Benson Margulies wrote:
>>
>> CXF has a difficulty field like this. It's called Estimated Complexity
>> and is a dropdown containing:
>>
>> Unknown, Novice, Moderate, Advanced, Guru, Needs James Gosling.
>>
>
> I think we will find that different projects do this in a different ways.
>  Perhaps we should just have a wiki page with links to the project specific
> newcomer wiki pages and then ask each project to have a link from their
> newcomer page to the Jira query with the issues for newcomers and ones for
> which mentors have volunteered already.

That's a start and easy to implement. Would you care to get it started
with Derby?

I do think we need to standardise across the ASF to make things
simple, but knowing who does what now is a really good start and it
seems we can get running quickly that way.

Ross

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Kathey Marsden <km...@sbcglobal.net>]

Benson Margulies wrote:
> CXF has a difficulty field like this. It's called Estimated Complexity
> and is a dropdown containing:
>
> Unknown, Novice, Moderate, Advanced, Guru, Needs James Gosling.
>   

I think we will find that different projects do this in a different 
ways.  Perhaps we should just have a wiki page with links to the project 
specific newcomer wiki pages and then ask each project to have a link 
from their newcomer page to the Jira query with the issues for newcomers 
and ones for which mentors have volunteered already.

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Benson Margulies <bi...@gmail.com>]

CXF has a difficulty field like this. It's called Estimated Complexity
and is a dropdown containing:

Unknown, Novice, Moderate, Advanced, Guru, Needs James Gosling.

The mentor question is not included, since the presumption at CXF is
that there's always a mentor available, and the only issue is to help
new people find things to chew on.

Very few new people ever have shown up just randomly looking for
things to do. They generally have bees in their hats on particular
subjects, and set to work on them. So this field hasn't gotten a lot
of exercise.


On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Kathey Marsden
<km...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Ross Gardler wrote:
>>
>> I propose that we should be working with projects to encourage them to
>> "tag" issues in JIRA that are suitable for various types of
>> introductory activities. So, for example, we might have:
>>
>> - mentor (indicating that this is a fairly major task for which a
>> mentor is available)
>> - entry (indicating that this is the kind of thing someone with
>> reasonable development skills can tackle whilst learning about the
>> project)
>> - non-tech (indicating that this is ideal for someone without fully
>> developed IT skills)
>>
>>
>
> Derby currently has a field for "Newcomer" which is a term I think we
> snagged from another project, but I don't remember which one.   It is listed
> as a checkbox under Issue and fix info.  I think Newcomer combine non-tech
> and entry though.    I think that is ok as usually that aspect is clear as
> you drill down in the issue.  I think it is ok to combine the two.  For
> "mentor" I think it would be good to make it "mentor available" which is a
> bit longer but clarifies that it is not an issue looking for a mentor, but
> rather an issue  looking for a mentee.
>
>
>
>

Re: Tagging issues in projects

[Kathey Marsden <km...@sbcglobal.net>]

Ross Gardler wrote:
> I propose that we should be working with projects to encourage them to
> "tag" issues in JIRA that are suitable for various types of
> introductory activities. So, for example, we might have:
>
> - mentor (indicating that this is a fairly major task for which a
> mentor is available)
> - entry (indicating that this is the kind of thing someone with
> reasonable development skills can tackle whilst learning about the
> project)
> - non-tech (indicating that this is ideal for someone without fully
> developed IT skills)
>
>   
Derby currently has a field for "Newcomer" which is a term I think we 
snagged from another project, but I don't remember which one.   It is 
listed as a checkbox under Issue and fix info.  I think Newcomer combine 
non-tech and entry though.    I think that is ok as usually that aspect 
is clear as you drill down in the issue.  I think it is ok to combine 
the two.  For "mentor" I think it would be good to make it "mentor 
available" which is a bit longer but clarifies that it is not an issue 
looking for a mentor, but rather an issue  looking for a mentee.