Hi, I created this thread because I’ve been contributing to OpenMRS only by solving tickets. Now looking at Jira, the tickets available are not that friendly.
Please I wish to find out if there’s another way to contribute other than solving problems related to tickets. I hope this helps someone too.
First of all, thanks for your contributions! As gcliff mentioned above, documentation is a great way to get involved.
Other than that, you can participate in Talk threads right here as well. It helps a lot when community members are able to provide information to other developers or implementers.
You can also help out our Infrastructure team if you have system administration skills. Check out tickets in the ITSM namespace if you’re interested.
Thanks for asking @joachimjunior. I think curating tickets is also very useful. I do it occasionally and opportunistically, but it should require a lot more attention than it currently does.
I tend to enforce a structure where the description is split in subsections:
Background or Description
Suggested Solution
Dev Notes
Acceptance Criteria
And for bugs:
Background or Description
Steps to Reproduce
Suggested Solution
Dev Notes
Many tickets require better specs or background info and even sometimes just simply a proper title that makes sense. They are often not linked to each other or to relevant Talk/Slack threads.
In short, our Jira needs a lot more care and love than it has been getting.
What @mksd mentioned (i.e., ticket curation) is very important and something we really need some assistance with. I’d also note that you’re welcome to create new tickets yourself.
Some more low-hanging fruit development-wise would be to add additional unit tests to core to improve code coverage (you can find the current state of code coverage here and also the gaps in coverage). Code coverage isn’t a perfect metric, but it’s quite clear that there are parts of the logic of the application that aren’t covered.
Another thing to do would just be to review the list of bugs in Sonar. Most of what I see are actually real bugs that should be fixed.
Neither of those two things are terribly exciting but they would help improve the OpenMRS product.
I just discovered the bugs at Sonar, is not well structured. Like it’s difficult to figure out the most recent bugs. I don’t know if there’s a way to improve on that.