[QGIS-Developer] Issue priorization for bugfixing: go flag your favorite issues

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi Paolo

On 8/24/19 9:21 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Hi Matthias,
>
> On 24/08/19 09:16, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
>> Yesterday at a dinner with many well known friendly faces, a discussion
>> started about the priorization of issues.
>>
>> One of the main problems when deciding which issues to tackle is, that a
>> developer perspective often differs from the one from the average user
>> perspective.
>>
>> So we thought it might be a good idea to start giving our users a bigger
>> voice in how bugs are prioritized - and how the projects funds are spent
>> - by giving the developers more information about the "impact footprint"
>> of issue reports.
>>
>> *In short: if you particularly hate an issue (or two or three) go to
>> this issue on github and just give the first post of it a thumbs up**👍**.*
>>
>> The following link will then show the leaderboard of annoying things
>>
>> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc+label%3ABug
>>
>> While there is no guarantee that these bugs really will be solved first
>> (there are a couple of other things also to take into account, like a
>> well defined solution being at hand) this should give us a much better
>> (democratic) idea of the often-cited user expectation.
> I find the idea interesting and positive, but I see a couple of problems:
> * this may generate frustration among users (why the hell an issue with
> tens of "likes" has not been solved already? You crappy developers don't
> listen to us!)

I think this is mainly a point of communication.

If explained well as an "indication" and not as a "guarantee" - online 
and live while teaching - I think we'll get the message out.

And, even if not fixed it will help us triage the important ones and add 
status information (for those who read carefully).

> * thumbs up is cheap, and does not necessarily reflect real interest.
> I would be more in favour of an honest expression of interest: I put my
> money where my mouth is. Can we have a mechanism of donations attached
> to a articular ticket?

It's an interesting idea, but I am afraid we'll put the project in a bad 
position. In particular, it brings the project into a situation where it 
acts as a service provider proxy, where it's easy to interpret the 
project as the one to take responsibility for those bugs being fixed 
(just like you wrote above "why the hell has issue X not been solved 
yet", but with money involved this time), and last, it's hard to come up 
with a good process (should there be estimates first? or money first and 
when there's enough someone picks the issue?).

I would say we better leave this role to the developers and have 
earmarked fundings for well defined projects (like the mac builds) or by 
directly advertising current crowdfunding projects from developers.

Cheers

> Cheers.
>