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show.tiki.org project: improve bug reporting and solving

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show.tiki.org project: improve bug reporting and solving
FOSDEM 2014

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (Tiki for short) is the Free and Open Source Web Application with the most built-in features. It also has a very open developer community policy which supports "the wiki way of writing software". This emphasizes some common challenges, especially in terms of debugging and bug reporting.

This talk is about the infrastructure at show.tiki.org which we have set up for bug reporters to showcase the bugs on a running Tiki instance.

This project was started during the April 2013 Ottawa TikiFest where we pondered ways of improving Tiki by improving our debugging process. We have already had a bug tracker for ages, but too many bugs stay unresolved because they are not understood or not reproduced by the volunteer developers.

So we started this new project to facilitate bug reporting and solving. It can be quite time consuming to read and understand some of the bug reports (They are often edge cases). Experience shows that if you can demonstrate a bug (and for a regression, pinpoint which commit introduces it), things can get fixed quickly.

This talk will:

  • Explain what issues this infrastructure solves
  • Explain the benefits to bug reporters and how they use it
  • Explain the benefits to developers and how they use it
  • Explain the scope, early requirements, technical choices and plans for the future
  • Describe the underlying technical infrastructure
  • What was postponed/is planned for version 2.

This is a very successful project which brought many benefits to the Tiki community. Both users and coders appreciate it. It hosts 200 live sites after 4 months of existence. There will definitely be a version 2.

We feel it could be of benefit to other web-based projects. It might be either reproduced from general principles by rewriting and adapting our code or, if there is interest, it could be branched off Tiki and expanded as a more generic solution for any wiki (or web-based) application.

Speakers: Jean-Marc Libs