What better way to bond with your community than hold a sprint and earn commit access?

Figure 1: Participants having a great time

Sprinting

On May 11, I led a sprint in Waterloo, Ontario in conjunction with the San Francisco OpenHatchers. The intent was to help people here get involved in the community, and to give myself an idea of what kinds of requirements I might need for the tool I'm building.

In addition to consuming many sandwiches and much ramen, we opened 7 issues, resolved 4, made 6 pull requests (4 of which have been merged), and I closed my first 3 pull requests as an official OpenHatch contributor. Not bad for a group of 8 students that had never contributed to open source software before!

This gave me valuable data as to what I as an event organizer might need in a bug set tool. Asheesh helped pick out a number of bugs in advance for the event, shared in a MoPad. This was easily accessible by all attendees, but could be accidentally cleared and was not a particularly rich source of information. Things that would have been useful include a place for attendees to mark the bug as "claimed" or assigned, skills required for completing the bug, an estimated work effort time, the area of the project the bug addressed (frontend, backend, web), etc.

Project Design

Already, Asheesh and I have pivoted on our original ideas. Initially we were thinking of something more search-focused to aid organizers in finding bugs, but we are now more convinced that tracker "advanced search" functionality is sufficient. Rather, we want to focus on importing these bugs into our list and adding annotation.

I've consulted with Shauna and am sending out additional emails with request for comment to other possibly interested users. I've summarized the initial iteration's design, along with Shauna's feedback on the wiki. This includes carefully hand-sketched mockups of a number of different screens in the work flow. Next week I think we will be ready to begin implementation, starting with the new data models for the tables we'll use to hold annotated bugs and bug lists. As Django has the ORM magic that I'm unfamiliar with, I'll be reading up on that this weekend to prepare for code next week. I might also look into writing test cases/user scenarios.