[ubuntu-uk] 5-a-day

[James Westby]

Hi,

You might have already heard about 5-a-day. It's the effort to
get more people triaging and working on bugs. The idea is that
everyone tries to work on a small number of bugs a day.

You don't need to fix the bug, you don't even have to understand
what is going on, for instance the first line of bug triage
has to do things like:

  * check the bug is filed against the correct package, or
    pick one if it filed without a package. You don't need
    to be certain that you have the correct package, just that
    it is the right area. If you assign to a package that is
    not quite right then someone else will assign it to the
    correct place.
  * Make sure the submitter has provided enough information.
    Have they explained what they were doing at the time of
    the crash? Have they explained what is wrong with the
    web page they are viewing?
  * Ask the submitter to try various experiments. Can they connect
    to their wireless access point if it is unencrypted? Does
    the printer work correctly if it is connected directly
    to the computer? This sort of thing is vital in figuring 
    out exactly what the bug is.
  * Has the bug already been reported? Search launchpad for similar
    bugs and mark them as duplicates if you can find one.

If you have an idea of what a good bug report looks like, or you
are skilled in figuring out what is wrong by trying different
things then you have all the skills needed to do this.

With 5-a-day you can use a script or a panel applet to keep track
of the bugs you work on, and then watch yourself in this list:

  http://daniel.holba.ch/5-a-day-stats/


If you want to find out how to get involved then look here:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

If you look at the bottom of the stats page you will see that there
are team rankings. This means that you can ally yourself with
your LoCo team and then the bugs that you work on are also counted
against your team. I think it would be great to have ubuntu-uk higher
up that list.

There are some pointers to interesting lists of bugs that could
be easy to work on on the wiki page, so that's a good place to
start. Another alternative is to join #ubuntu-bugs-announce so that
you can grab bugs as they are filed. Alternatively you could
take your favourite package and work on the bugs for that package.

There is also #ubuntu-bugs where there's a load of friendly
helpful people who can help you if you are unsure about how
to do something.

If you need something you can also grab me (james_w) on IRC
and I'll point you in the right direction.

Thanks,

James