Met up with Phil last night to go see Kung Fu Hustle in the late showing. Wow, this is just an incredible movie. There’s not too many movies you go to these days where you immediately walk out of the cinema thinking ‘I want to see that again, tomorrow’. Not your average martial arts film – but funny, stylish and for once, a good story and character development. I totally recommend this for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.
After 3 days of bug triaging, I’m still on P4 bugs. I’ve definitely pissed a few people off, but I hope they realize that this work part of being more effective at picking up new bugs that are being logged in the future. The P4 count is down from 900+ to just over 400 now and others in the team have already started on the 1000+ P3 bugs that we have.
If it wasn’t obvious from this exercise, Luis was totally right – Everyone Needs a Bugmaster. We would have been much more effective if we had done regular triaging rather than this once every so often approach.
Actually the whole bug life cycle process has been bugging me a lot, and I’ve been trying to think how we might be able to get a handle on things while we juggle managing 2 bug tracking databases – the community bugzilla, Sun’s bug tracker, and now OpenSolaris interaction. So I came up with a new crazy process of how I’d like us to work in the future. Okay, so it’s amazingly naive, and I’m sure it’ll have people coming at me with an axe, but in reflection, it nicely fits in with our long term goal of maximizing our work during the community unstable development cycle, which is going to benefit us much more in the long run.
So, this is a radically different, and so highly political that it may not be possible to pull it off, but I think it’s the right thing to do. It makes us more effective internally, and encourages us to work outside the walls of Sun as much as possible in the community bug tracker if we want a stable product at the end of it. It could be another hair-brained idea, and I’m full of those, but I’m hoping that it might help simplify our business and benefit everyone.
My new laptop arrived yesteday – a nice new Toshiba Portege M300, as well as a nice long life 12 hour battery. Spent some time downloading the ISOs for Solaris Express Build 22 and installing them. Everything seems to have gone well and quite looking forward to the challenges of running a 100% Solaris laptop as my main development box.
However, right now I’ve powered down the new laptop, closed the lid because I want it to be a nice treat after I finish this bug triage. I’ve gone through about 600 bugs in the last 2 days and managed to close a whole heap of really old bugs. Only another 400+ P4 bugs to go – fortunately I think I’ve started a trend and others are beginning to help now. If I seem responsive and unmotivated, you’ll know the reason. Triaging is *hard*.
Dear Federico,
Use DTrace. You’re killin’ us here…Seriously.
Love Gman.
P.S. Good work though, except with your choice of tools 😉
I always admired Luis, ever since Ximian signed a contract to Sun for supporting us with our GNOME 2.0 work. I don’t know how he managed it, but looking through 1000’s of bugs day after day was a herculean task. Of course behind anything like that is a good woman, and I suspect having Krissa over in Africa might have helped his concentration.
That being said, over the last 2 days I’ve been trying to triage the 1000’s of bugs in Sun’s bug tracker. Historically as a team, we’ve basically avoiding regular triaging of the database and focused on P1’s and P2’s – we even got temporary waivers to avoid looking at P3’s, as we couldn’t cope with anything more with our current resources. This kinda means that anything logged as lower than a P3 gets ignored, occupies space in the database, and rots away untouched. It’s a sad reflection of not really being able to coordinate our efforts better between a community bug tracker, and our own internal one. I think we’ve done a pretty ok job about getting a stable product at the end of any given cycle, but our process feels a little broken when you have people logging nearly every bug as a higher priority only because they know logging it as anything else won’t get it fixed, let alone looked at.
I’m going to spend the entire week going through the database. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to piss off a *lot* of Sun people with what I’m doing. I’m going to generate 1000’s of emails. And sometimes, I’m going to get things wrong. I’m using my best judgement in 5+ years of GNOME development, but everyone makes mistakes….
And after booking flights to Thailand, I followed up with flights to Sydney for Christmas – arriving 20th December, leaving 5th January. Nothing like spending money travelling when you’re down.
After a real shitty month, I decided that I badly needed a holiday. Booked flights to Krabi for 12 days of sport climbing, massage and chilling out on the beach in November. Everyone has said it’s an incredibly awesome place to go climbing and hang out, so I’m looking forward to it immensely, and being able to catch up with Patrick, and climbing with a cool group of people.
One slight bugger, is that I need to move out of my current place by 30th November, so will now spend between now and then searching for places to live – an utterly miserable experience.
Went and saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tonight – surprisingly enjoyable and well, Johnny Depp stole the show again with the various one liners. Had some curious departures from the book, but so did the old one which was abysmal. Really like the disco songs from the Oompa Loompa. Tim Burton got it about right I suspect, so hopefully Roahl Dahl has stopped rolling in the grave for a while.
Arrived safely back in New Zealand after a several hour flight. Nice to be back after such a crazy week, but felt a bit down due to the lack of a welcoming party at the airport. When I got unpacked at home, I figured I needed some treat to take my mind off things. I had scoped out the new PSP while hanging around Singapore airport. I had nearly bought one there, except for the fact that all they had were the white models. Dick Smith had a good range, and was soon walking out with a combo pack including ‘Underground Rivals’. It’s a really sweet handheld, and I especially like the wireless feature and web browser. As tberman said, the screen is fucking unreal.
Had an excellent night around town with Patrick being our host. Had some delicious food at a muslim restaurant, then a nice coffee, then a quick dash by his apartment before some more food. Then it was time for a foot massage. After being led to a rather seedy looking massage parlour which we decided to skip, we eventually ended up at a wonderful place just around the corner from the office. A good 70 minutes [of mixed pleasure and pain] for only 50 RMB. Fantastic – think I might have gotten the best one out of the four of us. A nice way to end off the week. One more day of this place place, and then I’m out of here again and back to NZ.
