Low bug triage activity all around

[Emmet Hikory]

Omer Akram wrote:
> I have been involved in bug triage for a while in Ubuntu and it seems this
> scene is not that active it used to be although alot of great folks from
> our community are highly devoted.

    Bug triage is something that is inherently wearing, and we've always had
some fair degree of turnover within the team (including many members returning
after spending some time with testing, development, documentation, or other
distractions).  In previous lulls, my observation is that it doesn't take
much to restore a sense of activity: there's lots of folk who are lurking that
might participate if activity was visible and a steady stream of new folk who
come with their own bugs and are generally happy to trade triage when stuck
on their specific issue.

> I am not sure about the reason behind that but one thing I am sure is that
> previously we had running efforts like "Bug Days" where a certain package
> was selected and all of the Ubuntu Bug Squad was invited to participate in
> triaging those bugs.

    I've always found these to be one of the best ways to restore activity:
whether the choice is a package, or a class of issues (I remember one bug
day called "fixing time itself" where we focused on all classes of clocks,
dates, and timing issues), highlighting a set of bugs and making clear progress
against them always makes the team feel good, incenting us to do still more.
There's been various discussions over the years about how often to have bug
days, or when to have bug days, with various results.  Some folk seem to
prefer weekdays, others have more time on weekends.  Some folk want to have
a regular schedule (e.g. every Thursday), whilst others would prefer something
less fixed (once a month, on different days, to account for different folks'
schedules).  I don't think there is a right answer for this, and suggest that
we try a few different efforts, depending on when our most communicative
members currently have time: unless folk are feeling very pressured, we'll
likely do better to have too many bug days than too few, and by having a few
small ones, we'll get a better understanding of when we might have resources
for a large one.

> Another reason which could be related is that now there is no one in the
> Ubuntu desktop team (or Canonical) to lead the effort of Bug management and
> community involvement previously Pedro played a big role there.

    We've had a variety of folk lead the bugsquad in the past, and I don't
think we should look exclusively to the Ubuntu Desktop Team or Canonical to
select our leaders.  For the events (bug days, etc.), we can probably do as
well if someone interested in running one just announces they will do so on
some given (future) date, and points folks at the relevant LP queries.  For
general channel activity, I've always found that if I start talking about
what I'm doing on the channel, others join in the discussion, regardless of
the time of day or year: the best way to get this back is just to do it.  For
developer coordination: there's a few developers who are regularly present
in our communications channels, but it never hurts for us to reach out on
the development channels to ask for a couple folk to be around if we're going
to focus on their stuff as part of an event: this can probably be delegated
to the event coordinators in the short term.

    Through a combination of the above, if we succeed in having regular
events and noticable channel/mailing list activity for a few months, the
sense of limited activity should diminish (without that much more work on
the part of those of us who are already doing so much), and I would be
surprised if we did not discover that we have some quite capable leaders
amoung us, who might not replace Pedro, but at least remove any sense of
leaderlessness.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY