OpenMRS needs more intro work for newcomers

harsha89 · December 29, 2015, 11:55am

Hi All,

We are having less number of intro tickets for new comers to work on. Can relevant developers and repo owners add more intro tickets with intro label? Current intro tickets are in [1]. There are quite old tickets which we need to revisit. Some are seems not intro tickets. I believe there should be existing tickets which we need to tag with intro label.

[1] - https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/TRUNK-3933?filter=10068

Thanks, Harsha

dkayiwa · December 29, 2015, 12:56pm

How many do you have in your list? https://issues.openmrs.org/issues/?jql=labels%20in(intro)%20and%20status%20%3D%20"Ready%20For%20Work"

harsha89 · December 29, 2015, 1:17pm

@dkayiwa it’s around 29. But when I go through them there more than half of them is not that much easy to follow for new comer who don’t have much knowledge. So we either need to do a revisit and create less complex tickets. It might be minor UI fixes, minor issues.

dkayiwa · December 29, 2015, 1:29pm

@harsha89 do you still have some time to add a few more?

surangak · December 29, 2015, 1:30pm

I agree with @harsha89, intro tickets are not just ‘easy work’, they’re often the first taste of OpenMRS that many people will get. Given that GSoC is also approaching, I think it would be a good idea if we can sit down and come up with some more intro tickets designed to make a few volunteers fall in love with OpenMRS

@dkayiwa, if you have some good intro ticket ideas, but not enough time to create detailed tickets, i’d be happy to create them for you

dkayiwa · December 29, 2015, 1:43pm

@surangak @harsha89
We usually go through the list of tickets across all modules, and the platform, and add intro labels, put some more explanations, to those we feel like so. My recommendation is that at any one time, feel free to go through this pool and curate those tickets that you feel are good for newbies. In other words, let us, as the community, make it an ongoing habit to once in a while spare some time to add more to this list. Do not wait for permission from anyone, you are already empowered to do so. Does it make sense?

r0bby · December 29, 2015, 11:00pm

Isn’t our charm and personality enough to make them fall in love? This community is awesome!

michael · January 15, 2016, 3:10pm

Harsha is asking for someone to be responsible for moving customer requests into workable issues. This is not his responsibility as the head of our Guides program – he is tasked with matching people to that work (that doesn’t exist).

I echo the call of @harsha89 & @surangak in getting our software engineering leaders, including our /dev/5’s and other higher levels, to figure out someone to be responsible for this. It is a travesty that we’re 10 years old and still haven’t figured out how to do this reliably. After talking about it for several years, we still don’t have clear product managers, BA’s, or anyone working our feature pipeline. So let’s fix that. How can I help?

harsha89 · January 15, 2016, 6:38pm

I’m getting several requests from new comers to point to some intro tickets. I also went through the trunk tickets, most of them are in medium complexity.

@dkayiwa currently what are the modules and component are at under heavy developments? So we should have new tickets from those modules to point to them

darius · January 15, 2016, 6:50pm

In theory, there is always someone dedicated as the “Community Development Lead” and one of this person’s responsibilities is ensuring that there are enough good intro and curated tickets.

@dkayiwa, is there a job description for this role on the wiki?

Also, to everyone, we welcome others who might want to participate in the rotation of Community Dev Leads: it generally rotates on a 2-week basis.

(As an insufficient step, @jthomas, please ensure that we spend 5 minutes on every PM call verifying that there are enough “intro” and “curated” tickets, in addition to the “community-priority” look we’re doing.)

burke · January 15, 2016, 8:00pm

The pages could probably benefit from some love & attention, but the Community Development Lead page is linked from the Community Development Swim Lane page.

darius · January 15, 2016, 8:47pm

None of those wiki pages explicitly lists things you must definitely due over the course of a week as the Community Dev Lead.

It would be great if those who have rotating through the role (@dkayiwa, @wyclif, @raff) could document that, so that (a) we can look for more volunteers to do this, and (b) we can think about measurements of whether this is actually working.

k.joseph · January 17, 2016, 7:42am

+1, i think that can be a good step to keep this wonderful intro list populated with issues that are fitting to newbies just as @harsha89 is doing a great work with the OpenMRS Guide’s program.

harsha89 · January 19, 2016, 7:38pm

Hi All,

Are we going to have a meeting to discuss on strategy to discuss about creating and moving existing tickets to intro tickets? Currently I’m getting several requests from new comers. We might need some brainstorming.

Thanks, Harsha

darius · January 19, 2016, 7:57pm

We should have a meeting like that (and I invite you to organize it!).

That said, I have a question: it seems to me that there are actually 28 “intro” tickets marked as ready for work. Given that, why are people requesting more? Are these intro tickets actually not well-written? Are they too boring?

-Darius

harsha89 · January 19, 2016, 8:10pm

@darius I can see some new tickets came :). Yeah some intro tickets are now very interesting and long hanging ones. For example following tickets.

https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/TRUNK-2867 - Related to websphere and requires some effort which also mentioned in ticket https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/OTHER-16 This ticket very old and might not have the code https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/TRUNK-1906 - Related to concept management module which seems not it used https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/TRUNK-188 - Very old ticket

These are some examples. There are several other tickets like this. We might need to run on those ticket and evaluate them again. I think it won’t take much time. Some tickets are boring because they dragged too much. When new comers going through them, I feel their first impression is not good that the reason they asking point them to good intro ticket.

I have dropped a message to Downey and Suranga to arrange a meeting. Will do the needful soon.

lluismf · January 19, 2016, 8:34pm

TRUNK-2867 I wouldn’t spend a minute making OpenMRS compatible with WebSphere.

darius · January 19, 2016, 9:03pm

Good point, I have cancelled this ticket.

And we should feel free to cancel tickets as Won’t Fix other tickets of limited value. (E.g. in this case open for 4+ years, without any comments expressing real interest, and not providing any particular value over running OpenMRS on an open source stack.)

burke · January 20, 2016, 4:22pm

I have a general announcemnt emai drafted. It “gsoc-2016” okay for a label for non-intro tickets that GSoC should consider?

-Burke

Here’s a preview of what I have drafted on Talk for the Developers category and waiting for me to hit the create topic button:

Attention OpenMRS Devs!The bad news:

We have an influx of GSoC students coming to the community NOW and we do not have an organized list of tasks for them. We literally have students looking at our pool of tickets and stumbling through old tickets trying to find good work to do! The good news:

You could get some work done for “free” if you take the time NOW to curate some tickets.

We want to fix for you the little things you haven’t had time to do. If you have an easy ticket with a clear summary of what needs to be done, label it as “intro” to get it into our pool of intro tickets for newcomes.

We want to fix for you some slightly bigger things. Many of the GSoC hopefuls have strong coding skills and can quickly surpass the “intro” level. If you have ready-for-work tickets with a clear description that doesn’t assume someone is already working on your project, label the ticket as “gsoc-2016” to get it on our radar.

What you need to do to benefit

Are you a module owner? Are you an implementer with requests for simple things that have too-long gone ignored? Here’s your chance: take a look at your project’s tickets in JIRA from the perspective of someone new to the community. How many “shovel ready” tickets do you have?

Get your intro tickets ready now. Clean up the summary & description of any small, simple tasks and label them as “intro”. If you know of small, simple tasks that are not yet ticketed, this would be a good time to describe them in an “intro” ticket to leverage the current wave of GSoC students.
Get some non-intro tickets ready now. Clean up the summary & description of any tasks that could be tackled by a skilled developer new to the project within a few days or week or effort. Label them as “gsoc-2016” to get them on our radar.
Make sure people know how to contribute. Ideally, module repos should begin following the GitHub convention of having a CONTRIBUTING.md file (like openmrs-core/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-core/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md describing how someone can contribute to the module. If you don’t have time to make a CONTRIBUTING.md file, at least make sure your module’s wiki page contains instructions for how a contributor can set up a development environment and, for now, make a CONTRIBUTING.md file pointing people to that wiki page. If your documentation is missing or stale, this is the best time to clean it up, since doing so now can easily lead to students contributing to your project over the upcoming weeks.

We will be keeping an eye on tickets labeled “intro” and “gsoc-2016” and directing students toward them.

Cheers,

-Burke

p.s. Please do NOT label tickets as “intro” or “gsoc-2016” if they do not have a clear summary & description and are ready for work. Doing so is counter-productive and is likely to discourage students from working on your project and within the OpenMRS community. If you see a ticket with one of these labels that is not clearly described & read for work, please either clean up the ticket or remove the label.

p.p.s. @dkayiwa https://talk.openmrs.org/users/dkayiwa, @raff https://talk.openmrs.org/users/raff, @wyclif https://talk.openmrs.org/users/wyclif: The Community Development Swim Lane should be curating intro and non-intro tickets for the Platform 2.0 release (openmrs-core, REST module, FHIR module, OWA module, and legacyui module).