In an effort to get our ticket system cleaned up before Friday's
sprint, I've done some housekeeping regarding the "Assigned to" field.
Until now, that field has effectively been ignored because every
ticket is automatically assigned to either me or Jacob as soon as it's
submitted. It's misleading to newcomers (and even some oldcomers), who
might say to themselves, "Oh, the ticket has been assigned! Great!
It's being worked on by this particular person!"
To fix this, I've created a "nobody" user and done the following --
* Every Trac component is now owned by "nobody." This means that when
a new ticket is created with a given component, it will automatically
be assigned to "nobody."
* I changed all open tickets to be owned by "nobody". I apologize if
anybody was actually using that field for something meaningful, but
it's quicker just to reset *everything*, given the fact that it's
impossible to tell whether a ticket was owned by a person by default
or owned by a person intentionally.
With these changes in place, let's begin using the "Assigned to" field
in a sane manner. Any contributor who is *actively working on* (not
"reporting" or "thinking about fixing" or "would like to think about
fixing") a ticket should claim it by logging into his/her Trac account
and selecting "accept ticket" on the bottom of the ticket page.
A good example of *actively working on* a ticket is Todd O'Bryan's
work on ticket 5369 (refactoring of django-admin.py help screen) -- he
created the ticket, brought it up on the mailing list and committed to
implementing it. In this new system, he would have selected "accept
ticket" at the bottom of the ticket page, to let other people know he
was working on a solution.
If you're looking to contribute to a particular bug/ticket and the
ticket is already assigned to somebody else, then you should do one of
two things:
1. Consider spending your valuable time on another ticket.
2. Contact the assignee and offer your help.
The whole point of this, of course, is to avoid duplicating work and
to improve communication amongst developers. This new system will be
particularly useful during Friday's sprint, when we'll have dozens of
people working on various tickets.
Finally, we should try enforcing a deadline on these assignments. If
somebody accepts a ticket and does nothing (as measured by number of
patches, mailing-list discussions and ticket comments) within a week,
I think we should assign it back to "nobody," sending the message that
this particular ticket is no longer monopolized by the given developer
and can be worked on by another developer with no fear of stepping on
toes.
Adrian
--
Adrian Holovaty
holovaty.com | djangoproject.com
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