A lot of contributions to OSS are either writing code to add
new features, or users requesting new features.
Both of these roles are critical but I've noticed there are few OSS
participants formally identified as part of a "triage" team, yet it's
quite common in the commercial software world.
Triage is essentially helping to decide what work should not be done, so that
precious resources get applied to the best possible features and fixes (or
least what work should have lower priority).
The term comes from the medical emergency rooms where doctors triage the
patients into groups of different priority. If you've broken your arm,
you'll being waiting behind the person who needs immediate surgery, even if you
arrived an hour earlier.
Certainly triage happens in OSS, a lot of times by development leads.
Tough decisions happen all the time. However scouring a huge bug list for
items that should be shifted up or down in priority, or questioning obscure
items that might really not be as important, doesn't seem to always happen as
much as it could. How could it with only extremely busy developers held
responsible?
Once example of this not being emphasized in OSS is that many projects have an
option to "Vote for this issue as important", while not having an option
to "Vote for this issue as not important" (allowing votes to be cast
as 0 to 5 stars would help this).
So for projects where I contribute or at least follow the progress, I'm trying
to make sure I keep an eye out for helping with triage where it seems productive.
Some project leaders may not want anti-requests or triage help, and that's of
course their choice. However I just think we should remember that an
anti-request could be the catalyst to get your actual feature request enough
resources to be completed sooner.
Lee
