Is the lack of issue tracking facilities in an open source project possibly an incentive for not participating/contributing?

Question

When deciding whether you are getting involved in a fairly big open source project in order to contribute to its code base, how significant are the project's issue tracking facilities (i.e. tracking of bugs & feature requests) for your decision to contribute or not?

There are still many non-trivial (huge code base) open source projects out there, that don't formally do issue tracking - and while some contributors may indeed still do this privately in the form of miscellaneous "ToDo" lists, I have personally found the lack of availability and established use of issue tracking to be a fairly reliable indicator for a lack of organization, structure and overall project coordination.

What are other people thinking?

Answer 1

I would say it would be a fairly significant factor.

An open issue tracking system is one component of what I would call having an 'open development process' - where anybody who is so interested can see the developers' decisions as they are being made, and contribute to the discussion.

Some projects don't really have an open issue tracking system (or a good one) but still have publicly visible discussion lists, maybe an IRC channel where there are always people on, maybe a forum/bulletin board, etc. In my opinion such projects are still fairly attractive in terms of contributing to them.

Answer 2

A number of projects that I'm involved with still do everything on the mailing lists. If a bug comes in (and gets confirmed, and can be fixed) its put in some kind of BUGS file within the repository. As things get fixed, the entry in the file is noted.

Not my preference, but its what other contributors are accustomed to and like. It could be that someone doesn't want the hassles of hosting the bug system, dealing with the SPAM it might attract, etc. Could it be that the project doesn't get very many bug or feature requests?

The real question of 'should you' really revolves around the code, no? Or how much you could learn / teach by working with any particular group? If you begin contributing and show yourself to be friendly and useful, you might meet no resistance when suggesting something like trac or bugzilla.

The only thing that would make me consider steering clear of any given project would be a total lack of any kind of version control. But, even then, I'd have to weigh what I'd be given up against the hassle of managing patches with racy merges.

Answer 3

What I have personally found is that while I work with very many different open source projects out there, I don't ever really become part of a larger group. However I do find bugs and would like to report them and would like to find out if the issue was found before, and when and if it is going to be fixed.

For myself personally, an open bug tracker or mailing list where I can shoot a one-off email to notify people of the bug is better than having to signup for the mailing list or register for the bug tracker. I already have enough accounts all over the place, I don't need yet another one for the piece of software.

So the friction involved in reporting a bug is definitely an issue, also being able to view the status of bugs and having them be searchable is a big help in determining on whether or not I will report my issues to the project or not.

So yes, open issue tracking, easy to use, easily visible (digging through a page for 20 minutes is not my idea of fun) and best of all with as little friction to get a report of a feature wanted/bug in.