Papercuts Proposal

Goals:

• Anyone must be able to submit issues that hurt their daily use of Firefox OS, regardless if the annoyance is user- or developer-facing, or is an enhancement, defect or poor performance.
• These issues should be processed, and the high priority issues identified.
• The high priority issues should be used when on-boarding partners and volunteer contributors, to ensure they're working on the important items that materially move the project forward, and to reduce the risk of their contributions not being taken.
• The Firefox OS engineers should be stewards of these contributions, allowing the project to scale beyond paid employees, in a way that mitigates the impact on short-term core code delivery.

Proposal:

• Identification
  • Product team's priority issues/features identified with "[priority]" in the bug whiteboard. These are backlog items that we don't have resources to fix now, but would take if a fix was contributed.
  • Other issues are nominated via the new "papercut" keyword. The Product team will triage issues with the "papercut" keyword regularly, adding "[priority]" to the whiteboard for the items they deem important.
• Priority issues are assigned an engineering mentor during weekly functional team triage. Initially each engineer will mentor 1-2 bugs, with a goal of all priority issues having mentors.

Implementation:

• DONE Dietrich: Propose to Eng Managers
• DONE Peter: Propose to PM, discuss during workweek - presuming this is done, since PM is already identifying bugs
• DONE Jean: File bug to get "papercut" keyword added to Bugzilla.
• ONGOING Dietrich: Coordinate training of each functional team on the Mentored Bugs program. - Tracked in this spreadsheet
• Jean Product team schedules triage of bugs with keyword "papercut".
• Dietrich Work with functional teams add papercut+priority bug triage to their pre-existing weekly triage sessions.
• Communication
  • Email dev-gaia, dev-b2g
  • Announce at Gaia weekly meeting
  • Announce at weekly Mozilla project meeting.

Measuring health & success (each 12 week release cycle):

• Track percentage of high priority papercuts have mentors
• Track percentage of the employed team were mentors
• Track percentage papercut bugs fixed by non-employees, and whether mentored or not
• Track that each component has more than zero mentored bugs.