What’s next for Dev-Squad?

Earlier this year we launched a new initiative called dev-squad. The initial goal of dev-squad was to hold weekly, 30-minute triage sessions to help move PRs and newly opened bugs forward. These triage sessions can focus on either PRs or bugs and do not have to cover both in a single session.

The initial sessions were planned to be held on Tuesdays at 06:00 UTC and Tuesdays at 22:00 UTC, to allow members across different timezones to run triage sessions. After testing these times for about 6 weeks, the meeting time was moved to Thursdays at 07:00 UTC.

Since then, we have managed to run several successful triage sessions, clearing the PR list and triaging any new bugs. However, there are currently some problems.

• We don’t have any official documentation so that anyone could potentially run these sessions.
• The weekly sessions are currently hosted by one person, and this is not sustainable.
• Currently, membership is limited to Training Faculty Admin members only, which limits the number of participants.
• We do not actively encourage new members to take part in or run sessions.

Therefore, I would like to propose that we set the following short-term goals for dev-squad, to grow its membership, and make it more sustainable and successful.

Timeline: by Friday 29 December 2023

Goals:

1. Document dev-squad triage sessions
   1. General format
   2. Process of triaging pull requests
   3. Process of triaging new bugs
   4. Adding triage updates to weekly training team meetings
2. Invite other training team contributors to participate in triage sessions
   1. Open dev-squad membership to all training team members
   2. Add interested participants to GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ with the relevant permissions to label issues
3. Work towards having more than one triage session host
   1. Set up a rotation of session hosts
   2. Plan the host rotation for the first 4 sessions of 2024

Are you interested in joining dev-squad, to help keep the new PR and bug issue list clear? Comment on this post and let us know how you would like to help or join the next dev-squad triage session in the #meta-learn channel on Thursday at 07:00 UTC.