There is an impression among many community members, myself included,
that Foundation development generally prioritizes new features over
fixing existing problems. Foundation teams will sprint for a few
months to put together a minimum viable product, release it, then move
on to the new hotness, leaving user requests, bugfixes, and the like
behind. It often seems that the only way to get a bug fixed is to get
a volunteer developer to look at it. This is likely unintentional, but
it happens nonetheless.
Putting a higher priority within the Foundation on cleaning up old
toys before taking out new ones is necessary for the long-term
stability of the projects.
ACN
On Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 9:05 PM Dan Andreescu <dandreescu(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
For example, of the 30 odd backend errors reported in June, 14 were still
open a month later in July [1], and 12 were still open – three months later
– in September. The majority of these haven't even yet been triaged,
assigned assigned or otherwise acknowledged. And meanwhile we've got more
(non-JavaScript) stuff from July, August and September adding pressure. We
have to do better.
-- Timo
This feels like it needs some higher level coordination. Like perhaps
managers getting together and deciding production issues are a priority and
diverting resources dynamically to address them. Building an awesome new
feature will have a lot less impact if the users are hurting from growing
disrepair. It seems to me like if individual contributors and maintainers
could have solved this problem, they would have by now. I'm a little
worried that the only viable solution right now seems like heroes stepping
up to fix these bugs.
Concretely, I think expanding something like the Core Platform Team's
clinic duty might work. Does anyone have a very rough idea of the time it
would take to tackle 293 (wow we went up by a dozen since this thread
started) tasks?
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