Working on the Bug Smash Initiative

Last updated on

17 April 2024

How to join

Anyone can participate in this initiative. There's no formal membership. Folks help the effort by addressing bugs. It’s as simple [sic] as that. 😅 The rest of this page gives direction and support for how to do that, no matter what your background or skills may be. If you help address an open core bug, and you tag the issue for "Bug Smash Initiative" (if it's not tagged already), you contributed to the Bug Smash Initiative and to improving Drupal Core.

How we work

Slack

We work via threads in the #bugsmash Slack channel. We're using the following conventions for emojis to start a thread to flag it for various tasks:

🚑 (:ambulance:) Looking for help.
♻️ (:recycle:) Looking for a review swap.
🎯 (:dart:) A #bugsmash target issue.
❓ (:question:) Looking for answers (second opinion on a triage or scope decision, clarification on a policy, etc).
💄 (:lipstick:) An issue to be triaged (emoji based on use by World War II nurses).
🐴 ( :horse: ) An issue marked as Postponed Maintainer Needs More Info (sometimes abbreviated as "pony").

Other Slack conventions / etiquette:

✅ (:checkbox:) If you resolve a thread, go back and edit the original post to add a checkbox to the front so everyone knows it's solved.
🧐 (:face_with_monocle:) Needs more info
Use ➕ (:heavy_plus_sign:) and ➖ (:heavy_minus_sign:) to vote on proposals.

Meetings

We meet every second Tuesday of the month at 0400 UTC (https://bit.ly/2zIyp2i) over Slack. The meetings are organized via threads, and asynchronous participation is welcome after the official meeting time is over. Note that this might be Monday evening for some people:
- 2:00 pm Tuesday - Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST)
- 9:30 am Tuesday - India Standard Time (IST)
- 5:00 am Tuesday - Central European Standard Time (CET)
- 8:00 pm Monday - Pacific Daylight Time (PST)
- 12:00 pm Tuesday - China Standard Time (CST)
- When in doubt, ask the oracle.
See #3153713: Bug Smash Initiative meetings - next: 2024-05-14 for all the transcripts of meetings, and for a link to the proposed agenda for the next meeting.
We also have group triage sessions on Google Meet

Issue Queue

We use the Bug Smash Initiative issue tag in the Drupal Core issue queue. See below for more links to issue listings relevant to this initiative.

All the "real" work happens in the bug reports themselves. Everything else (Slack, meetings, etc) is here to support contributors to solve the bugs via the normal Drupal core development process.

We follow the Issue procedures and etiquette.

What bugs we're looking at

In accordance with the development cycle and backport policy, we focus on issues for the actively developed versions of Drupal (9.5.x and higher as of December 2022). Contributors are also welcome to work on Drupal 7-only issues if they prefer, since Drupal 7 is also still actively supported.

The One ⭕

⭕ (:o:) “The One” is the oldest open issue in Drupal core, and our current target to swarm on. You’ll notice a regular automated message to check The One ⭕. Go to this issue queue search and work on the 1st issue in that list.

Tagged for the Bug Smash Initiative

Any issue we've touched as part of this initiative we're tagging with "Bug Smash Initiative", as long as it starts out as a bug report against Drupal core. Anyone can add this tag. The only criteria are:

The issue started as a core bug.
Someone wants to work on it and self-identifies with this initiative.

There's no formal membership. Anyone can self-identify as a bug smasher by using this issue tag on core bugs that they submit, triage, update the issue summary for, review, write code for the fix, add tests, etc. Anything that helps move a bug towards being resolved can be attributed to this initiative, and anyone can help. If it was a bug but gets changed to a support request, it still should be tagged. If it started as a core bug but it turns out to be a bug in a contributed module, it should still be tagged.

Everything already tagged has therefore been looked at least once. However, our ultimate goal is to get things fixed, not just triaged. So if you want to help move anything in this list along, that would be great. If it "Needs work", see if you can do that work and move it to "Needs review". If it "Needs review", see if you can move it to "RTBC", etc.

Needing triage from anyone

Bugs where the 'Maintainer needs more info'
Bugs tagged 'Needs steps to reproduce'
- See Document steps to reproduce a reported issue for help.
Bugs tagged 'Needs manual testing'
- See Manual testing for help.
Bugs tagged 'Needs issue summary update'
- See Write an issue summary for an existing Drupal Core issue for help.
Bugs tagged 'Needs screenshots'
- See Add screenshots for a Drupal issue for help.

Needing triage from developers

Most stale major and critical bugs (sorted by least recently updated)
Open bugs sorted by most followed
Bugs tagged 'Needs tests'
- See Writing / improving automated tests. for help.
Bugs tagged 'Needs reroll'
- See Re-roll a Drupal core patch for help.
Bugs marked "RTBC"
- We want to make sure these are really RTBC. Any time a core committer looks at one of these issues and has to set it back to "Needs work" it means they didn't commit and fix another bug.
- See Issue review for links to documentation on this task.

How to help

The Bug Smash Initiative needs lots of different kinds of support:

The easiest action is to check the status of any issue you have created.
Add your drupal.org username to the 'Submitted by' field to find the Bug Reports you have created. If you know it has been fixed then add a comment, tag it with 'Bug Smash Initiative' and it can be closed.
Issue triage.
- Learn how to Triage an issue report.
- Issue triage tips and templates
- Templates for issue status changes
Issue scoping.
- Issue scope guidelines for Drupal core issues
Issue review.
- Learn how to Review a Drupal core patch or merge request.
- See also the Issue etiquette page.
Manual testing.
- Setting up a test environment to review patches
- See the Testing code guide for more.
UX review.
Maintainer reminder.
Debugging.
- Start with the Testing code Guide.
Writing / improving automated tests.
- Write an automated test for a Drupal core bug.
- PHPUnit in Drupal Guide.
- Get help via Slack:
  - Open a 🚑 (:ambulance:) or❓(:question:) thread in #bugsmash.
  - You can often find help in #testing.
  - Since this is improving core itself, you could ask in #contribute.

Admin tasks

After an admin meeting the meeting is transcribed to a drupal.org issue and a new Meta triage issue is to be made.

Minutes

Make a clone of the latest minutes, it should only have the introduction.
1. Go to #3153713: Bug Smash Initiative meetings - next: 2024-05-14, scroll down to find the last child issue, open the child issue and clone.
2. Set the date for the next meeting.
3. Change the parent to #3153713: Bug Smash Initiative meetings - next: 2024-05-14.
4. If it has discussion from a previous meeting, delete it.
5. Save
Update #3153713: Bug Smash Initiative meetings - next: 2024-05-14
1. Update the title with the date of the next meeting.
2. Update the Issue summary with the date of the next meeting.
Transcribe the meeting discussion
1. Install Drupal meeting parser
2. Go to the meeting in Slack, in a browser, and use the parser to get the threads.
3. Past to the Issue Summary of the minutes.
4. Format the minutes. The parser does not handle the following;
  1. Bullet lists
  2. Quotes
  3. Multiple paragraphs in a single comment become one comment.
  4. In line code
5. Review the credit, and adjust as needed. Credit is given for engaging with a discussion.
6. Set to Needs Review and Save.
7. Post in Slack the minutes are ready for review.