DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Making the Issue Queue a Better Medium for Resolving Issues

Speakers: rzilouc2

Did you know that half of the issues in the Drupal issue queue remain unresolved for a long period of time? This can cause loss of community investment, missed opportunities for enhancing Drupal, and experienced members to leave the community. One of the reasons that the Drupal community deals with a huge number of unresolved issues is that the Issue Queue interface does not afford strategies for resolving issues.

The mechanics of participating in a discussion through the issue queue is relatively easy: writing a comment in the comment box and clicking on save. However, writing a comment that makes a meaningful contribution usually occurs through a complex process. This process may involve reading through the discussion to understand the current status, talking to individual participants through IRC, or even inviting experts for technical advice. However, the issue queue interface does not support this process. For example, all comments are presented in a similar way, regardless of who wrote them, the importance of the content, or the strength of the message.

In this session you will learn:

What causes the inefficiency in the Drupal issue queue interface?
What are some strategies that can be employed to improve the issue
queue experience?
What would an interface that employs some of these strategies look like?
At the end of the session, I will demo Procid, a new add-on for the Issue queue that implements some of these strategies to make the Drupal issue queue more efficient.

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