Bryce Harrington wrote:
- "Paint by Number" projects
============================== I think the reason our roadmaps, bug/rfe trackers, etc. haven't worked at getting more people contributing, is because oftentimes the procedure for doing the fix or implementation is extremely obscure.
From my own personal experience, the codebase can be quite difficult to
understand until someone gives you some clear guidelines. Sometimes 90% of the effort is just figuring out *what* to do.
But if an experienced core developer put in 1 hour just describing how to do a task, then later someone with less experience could use that description as a map to doing the solution.
It may seem that this would be inefficient - it may take less total manpower for the developer to just do the work directly. However, for the core developer, they could probably outline several tasks in the time it'd take them to complete one. Even more importantly, the end benefit is that the new developer gains expertise that may enable them to contribute more in the future.
IOW, "Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."
An interesting experiment would be for a core developer to spend a day going through bugs or rfes and rather than investigate them, to simply describe the steps they themselves would take to do it, and encourage others to give it a shot. Then later look back and count how many of the tasks were able to be completed by someone else. I bet we'd see a large net gain.
This has been a huge help for me. Thank you to Bulia and every one else who has taken the time to explain projects to me over and over. I feel like I've gotten some really useful stuff implemented working off your notes and I've learned a lot in the process.
Aaron Spike