It has been almost 2 months since we organise the first test day of the Symbian Bug Squad. We now have over 64 members in the mailing list , 5 Yellow geckos and a total of 53 bugs raised.
We have been adding 2 new active members to each test day, and seems that we are starting to crack the community testing nut. What about fixing bugs?
That is still an area were we still need to recruit more active contributors. We believe that there are two main challenges to address:
A bigger outreach
From our community efforts, we have seen that you need to contact at least 100 relevant people to get 1 to active test contributor. It seems that getting code contributions may require an even larger reach. Hence, we need to increase the community awareness of the bug squad in order to attract more code contributions. Here are a few things we have done so far:
- Featured the bug squad in the member companies newsletter
- Printing bug squad calling cards for face-2-face community events
- Contacting 3rd Party Symbian websites to support the bug squad efforts (see All About Symbian and Forum Nokia)
- Presentations at Symbian Council and Towel Day
A lower the barrier to entry
It requires much more effort and time to get a set up to fix a bug that to raise one. We need to improve the process as much as possible. We have identified a small group of individuals that are willing to fix a bug. We plan to walk them through the process and identify areas that we can make the set-up smoother.
Also we are improving the knowledge sources available on how to fix a bug:
- There is a new wiki under construction, and
- An IRC Q&A session on how to build a package
Suggestions Welcome
We are also looking for suggestions from the community on what could we improve to make it easier. Do you have any?
Victor Tuson Palau 