Beta Pizza Hackaton Starting Friday!

25. Sep 2013 | Jos Poortvliet | No License

Friday is the day: the Beta Pizza Hackaton is here.

Have you already been testing the Beta? Reported bugs? Great! This Friday we’ll begin to triage and fix them! There will be a concerted bugfixing frenzy, coordinated over IRC and Google hangouts, with (open)SUSE developers all over the world going through the bugs and fixing them. There are points awarded both for fixing and for triaging bugs and the top contributors can count on a prize!

Read on for details.

The BetaPizza Party Concept Turned Hackaton

Usually, the BetaPizza is as much about testing as about party. This time, we don’t skimp on the pizza but add in the fixing of bugs as well! The SUSE engineers will be joining us for a day to get rid of these nasty animals. The BetaPizza hackaton will take place on Friday the 27th of September, from office time in Taipei to Provo!

The plan is for the various offices to have a BetaPizza Master taking care of both the food and the bug fixing frenzy that precedes it. Ludwig Nussel from the openSUSE Team will be Global BetaPizza Master, keeping an eye on all this. And all offices will be open for openSUSE community members to join the fun!

[caption id=”attachment_16887” align=”alignright” width=”283”] An old toad[/caption]

Communication and collaboration

To do a decent job at this we have to communicate together and make sure we’re not duplicating work. To facilitate this, we have:

a bug list prepared, ready to be picked off one by one, in bugzilla (if you don’t know were to start, some relevant bugs will be labeled as GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE)
a Google hangout set up
a cool IRC channel for everybody to join: #openSUSE-pizza-hackaton on Freenode

Prizes

A committee of Old, Wise Toads (with help from the openSUSE team at SUSE) is going over the bugs reported by everybody testing Beta, tagging them with Gold, Silver and Bronze tags. Depending on these tags, points will be awarded for bugs. You can earn the points by triaging (checking and verifying) and fixing the bugs. For the top bugfixers we have some prizes prepared! Based on the points and an investigation into the work done, the committee will decide the winners. Since not all important bugs have been tagged, the points will be used only as initial estimation: the good old wise toads will have the last word.

Keep in mind that the tagging of the bugs is a work in progress and will change over the time, so don’t hesitase to go through the whole list of bugs and pick any one you think is important.

What the prizes are will be is still a surprise ;-)

Joining the Bugfixing Hackathon in SUSE Offices

For more information about locations, times and rooms, check the info in the beta pizza party/hackaton wiki. The main idea is the same everywhere: a whole day squashig, starting early in the morning and with pizza at lunch time. Since openSUSE folks are spread all over the world, that means a timeframe from Sept. 26th 22:00 UTC to Sept. 27th 22:00 UTC. Just contact your nearest BetaPizza Master and join!

About testing and fixing bugs

The process of finding and fixing bugs is rather simple:

Pick a bug from the list.
Fix the bug.
Close the bug.

See this page for some more detail and find here the workflow and osc commands for fixing bugs.

We’ll find out who closed what bug and award points accordingly. Note that closing a bug as duplicate or otherwise not by actually fixing something is called triaging and has a different number of points associated with it!

On the subject of triaging, this goes as follows:

Pick a bug from the list.
Check the bug report: is it complete enough?
Try to reproduce the bug and add information about the encounter, if you can.
Give a priority and set the status to ASSIGNED. Try to assign it, if you can.

The KDE team has an excellent page on bug screening, most of which is relevant all over openSUSE. Yes, triaging requires some special rights in bugzilla, during the day somebody on IRC can grant you these and even without, you can still add comments to the bugs which is equally helpful. Moreover, asking questions on IRC is totally OK!

Get ready…

For Pizza, Hacking and Fun!

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