Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Our #bugmeister gets you hooked

A homonym
What our #MediaWiki bugmeister does can be compared to the processes you find in healthcare. The patient says what ails him; for instance we want to get MediaWiki 1.17 stable and released. The first thing he does is triage, what bugs us. What prevents the release.

Then the magic starts to happen; communication.

An e-mail to the Wikitech-l with an invitation to a weekend sprint to swat those pesky bugs. This invite is to any and all MediaWiki hackers and it gives them focus and rapid review and implementation. Exactly what you do when you want people to be involved.

For those developers who do not know what to do in the rest of the week, there have been suggestions to work on the "Highest priority bugs" or on the "Most Popular bugs". These invites attract attention not only are people now working on these bugs, they are also changed when they need to get the attention of the people who are best positioned to deal with them.

All that and he is approachable as well. Who thought that bugmeister is just another really technical job is wrong, it also needs someone with social skills.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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