Reviewing the Bug Smash initiative and goals after three years

Bug Smash is a community initiative started in May 2020 to reduce the number of bugs in Drupal core.

This post follows Quietone’s Bug Smash Initiative 3-year update a few months ago by providing an update on the decisions of the Bug Smash community about the future of the initiative.

What are Bug Smash’s stats?

Here’s the raw data:

Within ~3.5 years, this initiative has reduced the number of bugs in Drupal core by 27%! 

That’s an incredible achievement for everyone involved!

What have we been up to since the three-year update?

Since Quietone’s blog post, we have completed a survey to decide the next steps for the initiative and to collect further feedback from the community.

The survey was open for several weeks and received responses from all over the world. 

In summary, the Bug Smash community has voted overwhelmingly to continue the initiative in its current form and expand our goals.

Here’s a summary of the responses:

• Expanding Goals: Several respondents suggested expanding Bugsmash’s goals.

• Quality over Quantity: Multiple participants emphasised the importance of focusing on crucial, long-standing issues rather than any one bug.

• Sponsorship: One user proposed exploring official sponsorship to tackle challenging bugs.

• Triage and Issue Management: Several participants discussed potentially changing goals to focus on triaging or creating an IssueTriage Initiative.

• Component-Focused Approach: A few respondents suggested a component-focused approach to reduce bugs in specific areas.

• Efficiency: Some participants mentioned reducing meetings to make them more impactful.

Some positive quotes and feedback:

• “The bug smash initiative renewed my interest in working on Drupal core. It is also a great way to get people into working on core, so I think the focus should move more to events and sprint tables.”

• “This is perhaps one of the most vibrant and important contribution to Drupal. Thanks again for the hard work. “

There were also plenty of suggestions about the initiative's future:

• “I am actually split between expanding our goals to more than bugs vs. focusing on bugs. I think having the initiative focused specifically on bugs is beneficial since these are often the most crucial to site owners. However, the initiative has been so successful that we could add tasks to its scope and help the core queue a lot that way as well. Maybe just major and critical tasks or something to start, as one standing item in the weekly objectives/threads.”

• “We should concentrate on the most crucial issues (bugs/feature requests), the issues that have been open for years and have hundreds of followers. Quality over quantity.”

So, what actions did we take from that feedback?

Based on the feedback, we’ve decided to implement the following steps for Bug Smash:

• Keep the initiative focused on bugs and expand our goals for another year

• Move the meetings to monthly to get some more engagement

• Reduce the daily triage to one item a day

Why not go further than this?

This is a fair question, especially since so much feedback was about ‘quantity over quality’ and targeting critical/more complex bugs. 

The reason we’ve not proposed this is twofold:

1. We’ve tried having targets based on priority before, and unfortunately, they don’t get much traction. Major and Critical issues are labelled that way for a reason, which leads to the second reason:

2. Having an increased focus on more challenging and complex issues makes Bug Smash harder to get into for new users (both to Drupal and contribution), which is a key objective of the initiative.

Additionally, we want to bring some momentum back into the initiative. These past few months have been relatively quiet after a very active few years, and we want to lower the barrier to entry and not make busy community members feel guilty for not contributing.

Okay, so what are the new goals?

I propose maintaining our original goal of a 5% reduction in Drupal Core’s bugs. 

That would require something like the following by October 2024:

Okay, wrap it up Griff…

In conclusion, Bug Smash has been a tremendous success for Drupal over the past three and a half years and has helped hundreds of community members collaborate easily. 

The community wants to keep this going for at least another year, so we’re doing that.

If you’re interested in getting involved, please join the #bugsmash channel in the Drupal Slack and say hi!