Ideas

Road less travelled during a code sprint

Code sprints are a great way to work on pet projects, new features, crusty bug fixes or glorious UI improvements. Often times, a code sprint will have a goal and anyone that wants to attend the sprint should try to work towards that goal. The CiviCRM core team and community has a history of very successful code sprints, often times bringing together folks with different interests and skill sets. The European Code Sprint in NL was no exception.

The sprint focused on improving Unit and Web tests, Documentation and CiviMobile. We've participated in previous code sprints by improving testing, bug fixes and co-authoring the first CiviCRM book. Even though we couldn't be in NL, we wanted to participate and help address an area that we felt needed attention: the bug/feature backlog. We've witnessed numerous times where someone wants to help out with an open source project but it's difficult for them to figure out where to start. Drupal.org tries to address this by "bug bingo", where they present a random core issue and a random contributed module issue. Our goal for this sprint was to close out old issues that have either been fixed, implemented or are no longer relevant.

A few days before the sprint, we offered a couple of ways folks could get involved. Looking through all of the "future version" queue, we picked 10 easy-ish bugs and 10 hard-ish that haven't been updated in over a year. This list was chosen for people participating in the sprint to have the CiviCRM version of "bug bingo."

For our part, we tested, verified and closed 128 of the 300+ bugs in the "Future Version" backlog, with some issues dating back to 2005. While it was time-consuming to test every bug/feature/improvement, it was also helpful and inspiring to see how far Civi has come since the early 1.9 days when we first became involved.

Some of those features include:

• Next/prev buttons when viewing search results
• Massive improvement in handling import of contacts, contributions and relationships
• Flexibility in profiles and custom fields
• "Save and new" for contacts and contributions

Reading through the issue queue also highlighted some long-standing issues that would be fun to address in a future sprint. For example, we recently had a client ask us for reports on the number of emails sent when the nightly UpdateMembershipRecord.php script runs. During this sprint, we stumbled upon CRM-2555 which indicates this feature/improvement goes back to 1.9.

We hope the work during the sprint helps bring some of the more interesting (and very old) suggestions out of the weeds and makes it easier to play bug bingo in future sprints.