On 12/22/2015 10:06 AM, L. David Baron wrote:
On Tuesday 2015-12-22 11:49 -0500, Ehsan Akhgari wrote:
On 2015-12-22 11:18 AM, Kartikaya Gupta wrote:
On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 3:11 PM, L. David Baron <dba...@dbaron.org> wrote:
I agree it's definitely gone up recently, and agree that it causes a
lot of wasted time. I'm not convinced about closing the tree,
though; keeping the tree closed for extended periods just leads to
big backups.
How about everybody reading this message takes a look at the list on
http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/orangefactor/ and takes one of them to
fix? (Or, better, redoes the search filtered on the last 3 days
instead of last 7.)
I feel like a voluntary approach is likely to have very little effect,
given the way our goals and priorities are structured. There's very
little incentive to voluntarily spend time banging your head against a
wall. That's why I'm more in favor of a forced approach that is
mandated by managers/product owners/sheriffs (i.e. people who can
actually tell us to some extent what to do).
I have tried to volunteer some time from my weekends occasionally to look
into the most recurring oranges every few weeks, and usually every time I
manage to figure out a handful of bugs by spending a few hours and as a
result OF would go down in the following week, but then it would go back up
again. This is a demotivating task and doesn't really scale to the
magnitude of our orange problem. I agree with kats that a voluntary based
approach will not go anywhere.
Managers should definitely be supporting this, and sheriffs (and
anybody else with push access) should be backing things out for
causing intermittent oranges (even if that's not discovered until
days/weeks later).
If people don't feel they can fix intermittent oranges during the
business day as part of their job, that's a problem.
Hm... it seems like you could take that further. Fixing oranges could be
considered to be going "above and beyond" your normal responsibilities
(unless you're just fixing your own!). So for employees, you could
convert N hours of orange-fixing into up to M hours of additional PTO
whenever the orange factor > k. :-) If intermittent orange is indeed a
large project-wide drag on resources (and I believe it is), then the M+N
hours of regular work "lost" in this way should be more than compensated
for by the reduced overhead on everyone.
Just a thought from someone who wouldn't have to work through the
details. And it's crazy enough already that I won't mention the
tacked-on idea that if unpaid contributors spend time fixing oranges,
then we'd send them free graphics hardware of the sorts that we have low
pre-release coverage on, with no strings attached other than "if you
give this away, please don't remove the sticker that says 'You can help
Firefox! Just switch to the beta release channel! This card is worth 42
points on Mozilla's Hardware Diversity Scoreboard.'")... ;-)
But I don't think having mozilla-inbound/mozilla-central be closed
more than it already is is going to help anything. It will just
make people frustrated that they can't land what they've been
working on.
Amen. Trying to artificially force this stuff is going in the wrong
direction. After all, you'd be reducing productivity from the top-down
in order to improve productivity. It might work, it might not, it might
help for a while but have long-term negative consequences.
Personally, I feel like getting farther away from our volunteer-driven
roots is dangerous. Sure, we have lots of paid staff now, but you really
don't want any more selection pressure to push the overall contributor
base towards people who are involved for the money and away from people
who are motivated by the mission.
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