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User:SSethi (WMF)/Sandbox/Suggested improvements to annoying little bugs page

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Problem

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‘Annoying little bugs’ is a good resource. But, IMO there is a problem. In our new developer surveys, it has come up several times that it is hard to choose a task to work on. Looking at this resource, I sense that it can be overwhelming to a) first decide on a project from the massive list on wiki, and b) then pick a task associated with a project from another massive list on Phabricator; considering that sometimes these tasks are old, unconfirmed, lacks proper description, and already a work in progress. Also, for DevRels, there is no way to pay extra attention to new users on Phabricator who may be working on some of these bugs as their first task for Wikimedia.

Trying to solve..  

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Make it less cumbersome and time-consuming for new developers to jump start on a bug they like and provide a process for DevRels to monitor bugs that new developers are working on!

Possible approaches for a small experiment

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  • Develop a script that provides a dropdown/search feature on the ‘Annoying Little Bugs’ page and makes it easier to choose a bug by a technical area/project or programming language
  • Include a separate section that showcases a list of five latest, easy bugs that currently have no owner and for which we do not have a patch in review tag already. Like in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/xf0gvyQXJMtl/#R. We also encourage new developers to add their name next to the bug. This list gets updated automatically through a bot on a weekly basis. DevRels could then try to pay little extra attention to the list of bugs we are showcasing in this section; understand what gets picked up what gets not, also improve the task description of these bugs and monitor challenges new developers experience.
    • Artificially reducing to 5 or 10 tasks that lately received updates sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure I understand why there needs to be a separate on-wiki "list" that requires manual maintenance instead of linking to a Phab query? I guess "new developers to add their name next to the bug" refers to an on-wiki list? Is there an advantage to new developers adding a comment in the Phab task itself? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
  • Add a concise step by step explanation for how to pick a task on Phabricator, what different concepts or tags mean, how to read the bug description or identify a problem and proceed from there!  (include screenshots) e.g., https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/SolveProject
    • I was hoping that mw:New_Developers could be close to that very GNOME wiki page but realized...it's complicated to come up with generic and correct information if projects do not use the same task tracker or code hosting. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
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