Join the Views Bug Squad

As maintainer of an important project on drupal.org, one of the most challenging and time consuming parts of the job is managing the issue queues. When there are hundreds of thousands of users on a project, there is bound to be a lot of activity on that package, from asking for support, asking for new features, and finding bugs. The rate at which an issue queue grows is related both to the quantity of people entering issues into it, but also the quality of the maintenance of the queue. Sometimes, even simple maintenance on a queue is very time consuming and distracts from the other myriad responsibilities that a maintainer has.

In the Drupal Handbook, we have instructions on performing triage in various queues. Naturally, that article focuses on the Views queue, because it is one of the five most difficult queues to manage on drupal.org. The things it focuses on are relatively easy tasks, with some suggestions. Additionally, Views has a well defined issue submissions guideline that helps inform users how to submit issues, but also can help reviewers determine if an issue simply needs to be kicked back to the submitter for more information.

The one problem with this is that while anyone can do triage, at this time there's one thing just anyone can't do: assign issues to me to bring them to my attention. Plus, even if people could, if just anyone could do it, I probably would not actually pay much attention to the list, because just anyone could do it, and it wouldn't have a lot of meaning.

However, thanks to recent changes on drupal.org, I can give people a maintainership flag that allows them to maintain the issue queue without actually being a code maintainer. That means I can give this flag freely without the high level of trust needed to have CVS commit access to the project.

To that end, I'd like to form an official Views' Bug Squad. And, if people want, an official Panels/CTools' Bug Squad, though those are much calmer queues and far less in need of gardening than Views.

Bug squad members would:

• Be willing to spend a few hours per week (or per month) going through issues.
• Their primary purpose would be to determine the veracity of issues:
  • Does a support request contain enough information?
  • Is a support request even answerable?
  • Is a bug reproducible?
  • Is an issue a duplicate of another issue?
  • Is a feature request even valid?

  None of these tasks require skill as a developer (though obviously you have to be able to use the software well enough to create reproduction situations) but it can be time consuming. Sometimes you'll end up answering questions. Sometimes you'll just verify the question is legit and kick it up a level.

• Be able/willing to provide summaries.
• Be willing to put up with difficult behavior from a small but vocal population users.
• At higher skill levels, be able to review patches. This is a nice thing to do, but it's not a requirement for the squad.
• Help out with documentation issues and patches.
• Assign issues to me or dereine when they're verified or simply too difficult for anyone without massive Views' internals knowledge to answer.
• Help evolve the issue submissions guideline for Views, and possibly for all of Drupal.
• Be listed as a maintainer of Views.
• Be able to sign their posts with a spiffy made-up title!

In an ideal world, this team would be enough people donating enough hours to the cause that any one person could rotate in or out and there would still be relatively regular activity doing this. My feeling is that if 7 people sign up for this job, and each person is willing to contribute 4 hours per week, then after a couple of months of this, we'd get the existing 1,000 open issues down to half of that number, the amount of time needed by the team would drop, and those 7 people would have learned a LOT about Views that could benefit them in the future.

It's easiest if people who do this can be on IRC, but that is totally not necessary at all. IRC is nice for having quick chats about issues, but ultimately all of this work can be done directly in the issue queue.

So. Any volunteers?