There has been a lot of discussion in a variety of places recently about the barriers to entry of various Eclipse projects or projects being closed to contributions etc. I agree. Frankly, the situation sucks. Several of the projects with which I am involved are more or less opaque to the outside world. This is not by design or plan or any form of ill-will. Nor am I or the teams happy about this. For the most part it is a result of people fixing bugs, adding features and generally hacking code rather than writing doc, examples and getting started guides. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

So, what can be done. Certainly the project teams are very keen on improving the situation, but where to start? There are so many enhancements, bugs and features to work on. Ultimately, we have to make the time to do what it takes to grow the contributor base.  Status quo will not do.

The community is keen to use the technology and contribute where they can, but the wall seems so high. In many ways it is but you have something that can lower the wall — a Bugzilla ID.

With Ganymede on the horizon we are about to get hordes of eager consumers taking the latest we have to offer and put it to their use. They will have lots of questions and perhaps even the odd problem or two. Many people in the community today know the answers or “have been there and done that”. If you have a Bugzilla ID (who doesn’t?) then you can comment on and triage these bugs. This is a huge contribution. How big? Let’s look at some numbers.

Since June 1, 2008 and 2 minutes ago (i.e., 10 working days), 629 bugs were created in the Eclipse project Bugzilla bucket alone. Even at 1 minute per bug for triage (short for dealing with new bugs but it keeps the math simple) that is more than 10 hours of time just to manage the flow of new bugs for two work weeks.

Could you really make a difference? Many hands make light work. It turns out that 103 of those bugs have since been closed as Duplicate, WorksForMe or Invalid. There are many people in the community who could help with this sort of work. Quite a number already do! THANKS. It is not glorious work but given that time taken to determine these resolutions is often in addition to the initial triage, man does help.

But wait! There’s more you can do with that Bugzilla ID. You can write and revise wiki pages! Whether it is Getting started guides, FAQs, Tips and Hints, Examples, … if you have spent the time to figure it out, write it down in the wiki.

Contributing in this way has many great characteristics:

• No/low barrier to entry. If you figured something out and have a Bugzilla ID then you can help
• Lowers the barrier of adoption for the community by helping them get started and avoid the pitfalls you have already found.
• Makes you feel good.  Plain and simple.
• It is one of the first steps towards deeper involvement in the project
• Committers see you helping and have a tendency to want to help you
• People from outside the implementation team have a great opportunity and ability to give a fresh perspective that teams often don’t see.
• Even better, it saves time for the committer team. They then have more time to fix bugs, implement enhancements and add features. Some of these may even be things you wanted done!

I do not mean to imply that the challenge rests solely on your shoulders. The teams need to make the time to bring the community along. Several people have pointed out good progress. There is more to be done. Stay tuned…

Nor do I imagine for a second that bug triage and wiki pages solve all the problems or tear down all the barriers. They certainly can’t hurt.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.