Improving Quality

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

I believe that the key to GNOME's success is providing quality UX
straight out of the box. We've made a lot of progress in this area,
but to take it to the next level, I believe that we need to be more
rigourous and coordinated.

For the 3.15 cycle, I'd like us to try and do a better job at tracking
issues that affect the overall GNOME user experience. The basic
features of what I'm proposing:

 * At the beginning of each cycle, the Release Team draws up a list of
bugs that affect the overall user experience.

 * The list is tracked in Bugzilla, and a summary is sent to d-d-l. We
set ourselves the goal of fixing as many of the issues as we can.

 * Over the cycle, the release team regularly reviews the list of bugs
and sends an update to d-d-l, saying how many have been fixed, what
the priorities are, and so on.

This should hopefully give us greater focus, and enable us to start
tracking issues early rather than late. I also hope that it will
encourage contributions.

My idea is to use the gnome-version Bugzilla field for setting the
list of bugs. (But I don't want to get too hung up on which exact
mechanism we use.) This means that the list will eventually turn into
blocker bugs at the end of the cycle, which I think is beneficial. We
can always punt non-critical bugs to the next version if they aren't a
priority.

There are plenty of other implementation details to work out, of
course. I can provide a more detailed proposal if there is support for
the idea. Or we can just get started and figure it along the way.

Thoughts?

Allan