Input: 2013 retrospective
It was a big year for Input. In 2012, we spent the last half rewriting Input. In 2013, it went through sec-review, had a bunch of things fixed and then we migrated to the new system.
Since then, we've been fixing bugs, reimplementing features that were lost and writing the scaffolding for the new set of User Advocacy dashboards and tools.
Let's look at some Bugzilla and git stats for the year:
Twas the year: 2013
===================
Bugzilla
========
Bugs created: 150
willkg : 100
cwwmozilla : 5
fbraun : 4
mgrimes : 4
tdowner : 3
stephen.donner : 3
me+bugzilla : 2
gasell+mozilla : 2
mcooper : 2
glind : 2
mozaakash : 1
kdurant35rules : 1
hitmanarky : 1
kbrosnan : 1
bob.silverberg : 1
splewako : 1
rrosario : 1
mattbasta : 1
educmale : 1
feer56 : 1
326374 : 1
anthony : 1
shopov.bogomil : 1
peterbe : 1
l10n : 1
chrismore.bugzilla : 1
landis : 1
dron.rathore : 1
rq : 1
MattN+bmo : 1
joshua-smith : 1
cturra : 1
swagat.kanungo : 1
Bugs resolved: 268
willkg : 157
: WONTFIX 50
: FIXED 89
: WORKSFORME 8
: DUPLICATE 9
: INVALID 1
cwwmozilla : 57
: FIXED 1
: WONTFIX 7
: WORKSFORME 29
: DUPLICATE 1
: INVALID 19
mgrimes : 10
: FIXED 1
: DUPLICATE 1
: WORKSFORME 5
: INVALID 3
shopov.bogomil : 7
: WONTFIX 1
: WORKSFORME 2
: INVALID 1
: FIXED 2
: DUPLICATE 1
mcooper : 6
: DUPLICATE 1
: FIXED 5
mozilla : 5
: FIXED 5
me+bugzilla : 4
: WONTFIX 1
: FIXED 1
: DUPLICATE 1
: INVALID 1
mozaakash : 2
: WORKSFORME 1
: INVALID 1
trifandreialin : 2
: WORKSFORME 2
rrosario : 2
: FIXED 2
joshua-smith : 2
: FIXED 1
: INVALID 1
aaron.train : 2
: WONTFIX 1
: DUPLICATE 1
stephen.donner : 1
: INCOMPLETE 1
emorley : 1
: FIXED 1
curtisk : 1
: INVALID 1
unghost : 1
: WORKSFORME 1
rajul.iitkgp : 1
: FIXED 1
jruderman : 1
: INCOMPLETE 1
chris.lonnen : 1
: FIXED 1
nigelbabu : 1
: FIXED 1
tofumatt : 1
: FIXED 1
cturra : 1
: FIXED 1
fwenzel : 1
: FIXED 1
mbrandt : 1
: FIXED 1
INCOMPLETE : 2
DUPLICATE : 15
INVALID : 28
WORKSFORME : 48
WONTFIX : 60
FIXED : 115
git
===
Total commits: 277
Will Kahn-Greene : 251 (+51614, -16878, files 1132)
Mike Cooper : 12 (+38545, -249, files 219)
Brandon Burton : 5 (+21, -178, files 6)
Ricky Rosario : 4 (+36, -19, files 6)
Bob Silverberg : 2 (+11, -6, files 2)
Rajul : 1 (+3, -0, files 1)
Joshua Smith : 1 (+10, -5, files 1)
bogomil : 1 (+1, -1, files 1)
Total lines added: 90241
Total lines deleted: 17336
Total files changed: 1368
I want to highlight some interesting bits:
We resolved more bugs than we created. That's partially due to us going through and closing out old bugs for the old Input that aren't relevant anymore.
-
According to the Bugzilla and git data, there were 47 contributors to Input this year: 326374, Bob Silverberg, Brandon Burton, Joshua Smith, MattN+bmo, Mike Cooper, Rajul, Ricky Rosario, Will Kahn-Greene, aaron.train, anthony, bogomil, chris.lonnen, chrismore.bugzilla, cturra, curtisk, cwwmozilla, dron.rathore, educmale, emorley, fbraun, feer56, fwenzel, gasell+mozilla, glind, hitmanarky, jruderman, kbrosnan, kdurant35rules, l10n, landis, mattbasta, mbrandt, me+bugzilla, mgrimes, mozaakash, nigelbabu, peterbe, rajul.iitkgp, rq, splewako, stephen.donner, swagat.kanungo, tdowner, tofumatt, trifandreialin, and unghost.
That doesn't include localizers who do a ton of work translating the strings in the Input ui.
That includes some of the folks who work on the input-tests repository, but possibly misses some.
-
Most of the 47 contributors are not "core developers". That's cool, but I could be doing a better job here making it easier for non-core developers.
We maintain a Get Involved page and we hang out on
#inputon irc.mozilla.org. We have a input-dev mailing list. If you want to work on Input, this is where it's at!
Those are the stats.
At a high-level, we accomplished the following:
stood up a new Input code base
the beginnings of spam identification and removal
Input API for feedback submission
Firefox OS feedback form
infrastructure for an Analysts group with special privileges
the beginnings of an Occurrence Comparison report dashboard
One thing I discovered in 2013q4 was that it's really hard to be the mostly-solo dev on a project like this. I'm lucky that I'm part of a larger team, so peer reviews for work I've done is possible and timely. However, I find I'm switching contexts between the technical details of what I'm working on now and the high-level details of a bunch of possible future tasks/projects. That's really hard to do day-to-day and still maintain development momentum. I have some thoughts on how to serialize my work so that I'm doing less context switching and I can focus on individual things more deeply which should produce better outcomes.
My goals for Input for 2014 are these:
clean up the code base: there's still a bunch of weird stuff in there from the rapid development work we did in 2012
reduce barriers to entry for new contributors: better documentation, fewer steps to get up and running, more bugs marked for mentoring, more outreach, ...
build infrastructure that we can use for better User Advocacy tools: watched alerts, email notifications, dashboards, ...
flesh out tests: we're really light on smoke tests and regression-catching tests
work with Matt and Cheng to figure out where Input fits into the grand scheme of things; how can we make it a general-purpose feedback system? how can we handle non Firefox products and initiatives?
Yay for 2013!
Update 7:08pm
My script only showed top tens which misses tons of people who did work. I redid the data and that increases the number of contributors from 16 to 47. Oops!
Update April 21st, 2015
LGuruprasad found a bug in the script that caused commits-by-author information to be wrong. Fixed the script and updated the stats!