Sorry for the delay in writing up the results, but I’ve been on a plane and without my luggage for the last 36 hours (albeit in beautiful Verona) Now to the results…
Thanks to everyone who participated in BugDay this time around. For some statistics:
- 5 participating projects (ECF, WTP, Mylyn, PDE, Platform Ant)
- ~10 contributors
- ~125 bugs tagged as bugday bugs
- ~22 bugs fixed
- 10 of these bugs made it in Eclipse 3.4 M1
For the first time around, I’m very pleased with the results. To be honest, I just expected me participating in bugday and maybe fixing a WTP bug in good spirit (all while Wassim makes fun of me for the idea of a bugday). However, the community turned out and fixed issues for the purpose of just helping out or fixed issues that have long bothered them in Eclipse. I think the willingness to help just reflects on the great community we have in Eclipse and also shows that the open-source model of development can be very beneficial if done right.
There were some lessons I also learned:
- It’s nice to have a specific time for people to log onto IRC and chat with committers (this is tricky due to timezone differences though).
- Make sure that the bugs aren’t too hard that are marked as bugday. This was the big reason why the helpwanted keyword was so useless for new contributors.
- Attaching relevant Mylyn contexts to bugs was helpful to some
- Some people didn’t like the concept of BugDay and made it a BugWeek (thanks Peter)
- Having specific bugs marked as bugday causes people to contribute time even outside of the official bugday!
Thanks all again. The next bugday will be August 31st 2007. If you’re interested in participating, check out the FAQ and make your interest known on the wiki (or on relevant bugs).