In an effort to bring the community into our development process more, I (ocharles) have built a new little application to help the MusicBrainz community decide exactly what we should focus on. I present to you, the Scheduling Game!
The idea behind this little application is to let the community quickly scan through open issues and decide when they believe they should be fixed. Each editor is presented with 3 options:
- Within 3 months. This ticket must absolutely be fixed within 3 months from now.
- Within 12 months. This ticket should be fixed within a year from now. This means the ticket should be fixed within the year, but is not critical for the next 3 months
- Unscheduled. This issue is not pressing and can be fixed much later.
Later, when issues have been voted on by enough people, the developers will try and decide how to schedule work to best fit the needs of the community.
A few disclaimers… Firstly, this is just an experiment! We don’t know how well it will work, though initial testing has shown it to already be quite useful. Secondly, it’s not really much of a game, but I wanted to give it a cute name (I know how picky everyone can be!). Currently only a subset of open tickets are available for voting on – specifically tickets in the “NGS + 1” and “Post NGS” milestones on JIRA, as these milestones are in need of a sorting.
The scheduling game is currently live on my server at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/. You can have a look at the current (anonymous) votes at http://scheduling.ocharles.org.uk/results. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me in IRC as ocharles or email oliver@musicbrainz.org. Happy voting!
MetaBrainz Blog 
Pretty cool, thanks! Just a few things:
* it would be nice if the columns in the results page could be sorted
* it would be nice to see the progress while voting (e.g. 13/220 tickets voted on)
* I get “502 Bad Gateway” on login after having voted on all tickets (I think)
Hi hrglgrmpf – I really wasn’t expecting people to get through every issue we have so quickly! I’ve updated it to handle that scenario now. With your other 2 points, I agree they would be nice, but I think I’m going to keep it just how it is for now. The results page is mostly designed for us to work from, so issues with the most votes are at the top, which are the most actionable.
Fun game! 🙂
We can’t vote against a ticket.
Like -1.
What are the abstain and skip buttons? Are they different, in what way?
I got 502 but I don’t think I voted all tickets yet because I did not get to vote on some of “my” tickets. (._.?)
Hi,
Yes, I don’t want to add a “wontfix” button because I think if someone feels that way then they should be vocal about it and explain why it shouldn’t be fixed. The abstain and skip buttons mean that you will never be notified about an issue again, and that you just don’t want to cast a vote right now, respectively. I’m not sure about your 502, but are you seeing any more 502s since your comment?
I get a 502 as well.
patate12: I think the tickets on the list right now are only the ones in the NGS+1 and Post NGS milestones – which would explain why some of yours are not there.
The 502 bug is still there for me… 😦
Yes I still have 502 too, maybe because I parsed them all already and that 502 is the « thank you for voting » sentence in the end. 🙂