What could be done to improve the OM development process?

[Holger Freyther]

On Wednesday 13 August 2008 00:05:14 Jeffery Davis wrote:

> 2. Better communication between the development community and the end
> user community.  I have yet to see anyone say they're pleased
> as punch with the keyboard.  When almost everyone is unhappy, closing
> bugs as 'working as intended' is pigheaded.

Hey,

as this action is misunderstood a couple of small words. What is the 
bugtracker for? The way we have used docs.openmoko.org so far is to make it 
an engineering tool. The assigned/owned tickets tells/informs engineers what 
to work on, when to get it done (milestone) and how important that is.

The benefit of having as precise tasks as possible is that they are small, can 
be assigned to a single person, one can set the severity and the milestone. 
After this small task was done, the engineer can set it to in_testing and QA 
can test that single fix.

Now we have bugreports like the SIM PIN Dialog or the Keyboard. No doubt that 
there is a real issue but they are the exact the opposite of the above 
workflow. We can not assign a single engineer to take care of them. This 
means they will never be addressed as no one is responsible and not many 
people are capable of touching everything that would be needed to resolve the 
bug.

So how to get out of that? Look at the issues presented and file tickets for 
each single issue. These can be assigned to developers, these can have a 
milestone set, these can have a severity, these fixes can actually be tested 
and verified. With my limited resources, internet connectivity (GPRS through 
the neo), my available time and my main tasks in mind, I have simply no time 
to create the tickets for each and every issue. So I name the issues I see in 
the report (and yes the list can be incomplete) and rely on people/interest 
holders to file a new precise bug report. This is to make it possible for 
engineers actually being able to do a bugfix which is in the interest of the 
community...

Is that bad faith? How do others see that?


your pighead
	z.