Two weeks ago, we invited you to participate in the very first Global Jam for LiveCode. The focus was on fixing bugs in the latest LiveCode releases, and we put all hands on deck in our dev team, to fix bugs as you in the community reported them.

So how did it go? Would you do it again? Are there things you would improve? I put these questions to Ben, our Product Manager, Hanson, our Quality Center controller, and Richard, your Community Manager and organiser of the event. Here's what they said.

Richard Gaskin

The LiveCode Global Jam live chats brought many good questions. The general consensus seems to be that Global Jams are as good a thing for LiveCode as they are for other open source projects, so I imagine we'll have more in the future.

There was definitely room for improvement, but I think a lot of it has to do with gaining more familiarity with the Google Hangout interface. I've seen it used very productively in the Ubuntu Developer Summits and their Global Jams, so I know it can work. Perhaps we should consider video chats outside of Global Jam events on a regular basis? Maybe just addressing community issues and projects? Practice makes perfect. :)

Next time we have a Global Jam I'd like to include a tool like timezone right in RevNet itself, taking full advantage of having the info running in LiveCode:

http://everytimezone.com/

If anyone wants to make a time zone converter/world clock tool for next time please let me know and I'll be sure to include it.

Many thanks to all of you participating in this first LiveCode Global Jam!

Ben Beaumont, Product Manager

It was really valuable. On Friday we had all LiveCode engineers fixing issues live, and the community working live on the forums to help each other reproduce bugs. It worked brilliantly! We had 35 bug reports, our highest ever in a single day and fixed 23 on the day. 66% of bugs reported fixed, which is pretty good going.

On Saturday, the community took over. 12 bugs were reported, which is still very good and when we got back to work after the weekend we fixed 7
- that's 58%. Not an A but not bad either. Many of the remaining bugs were not fixed because they will be resolved as part of changes coming in LC 6.7 or 7.0, so fixes to those are just around the corner. All in all, a very useful day and we'll certainly be up for running it again if the community are keen to get involved.

You can watch Ben's Google hangout session video here.

Hanson Schmidt-Cornelius, Quality Manager

I think it went well. I think people liked it. They could see that there was a responsive team to look at and address the bugs they found. We got input through the forum and the qcc. It was good from our side to find responsive customers, in particular through the forum. If, for example we were not able to reproduce an issue, we could get back to them in the forum or on a bug report and they would reply near instantly.So the jam certainly shortened the lag in communication we typically see with bug reports.

It was quite hectic for me as messages were coming in frequently and I had to replicate quickly and then mark it as confirmed, with more and more bugs piling up. Other dev team members were also looking at bugs though and started picking the ones off that they could see were bugs and would also start confirming them.

It was a different approach to addressing bugs and in a way required a more proactive approach from the customers. Whereas normally you would come across a bug in your day to day work with LC and report it, here customers had to make an effort in finding bugs.

Would I do it again? I think so. It certainly gave us the fast turnaround time and people saw their bugs being processed quickly. It did increase the bug numbers on the days though. From a quality perspective, bugs reported on a given day are not necessarily processed, done and dusted on that day. It can take a few days after that to get all the issues confirmed and processed, as each bug is different, and some areas may be harder to replicate. So for me the jam started on the Friday but continued a bit further into the next week. I am sure this is also the case for development who were not able to address all of the bugs on the same day.

For the participants, I think it was great, as they got to interact with all of us and could see something was happening there and then.

Community Participation

Richard set up a dedicated forum to help in the management of the jam. From that forum you can see there was lots of activity, and a substantial number of community members did take part and find bugs for us. Many people also participated via the Google hangout sessions - 29 took part during Ben's session, 50 in Kevin's and 23 in Richard's on the Saturday.

I traced one bug report through to its conclusion. Forum user netdzynr reported a bug with the replace function. Hanson quickly was able to confirm it, the bug was registered as 12482 in the Quality Center, and it was fixed within the hour. The bug was first reported at 9.35am, and recorded as fixed and awaiting build by 10.15am. Pretty good going!