Bounties for bug fixers: a bug-tracker plugin

Trac - Integrated Project Management

Want to promote a bug fix or new feature? An extremely simple microPledge-based solution for your favorite bug-tracker is on its way. Here’s how it works:

You’ve just found an annoying bug in your cutting-edge Instant Messenger: when you type a smiley, it sends out a frowney. Humph. What a nuisance.

You’d like to do something about it, but you know that if you file a bug report on their bug tracker, it won’t get looked at for 3 months because it’s a cutting-edge IM client, and the authors are all excited about the new voice chat feature they’re working on.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could provide incentive to the developers to fix your bug? You guess there are at least 100 other people who are annoyed by the bug. If you could team up with them … let’s say you could all pledge $5 to the fix. I’ll bet you’d have a developer on the case in minutes. Even most rich developers that I know will snap up $500 just to change frowney to smiley.

Well, here comes Fund-a-bug. This project represents the first endeavor to integrate a bug tracker with microPledge. The Trac system is an obvious choice to start with because of its wide-spread use and its simple way of writing plugins.

Of course, you wouldn’t need this plugin to start a microPledge project to fix your bug. But writing up a project would take effort. And getting people to know about the funding project would be a challenge. But with this Trac plugin, the bug appears right there in Trac where people are looking. And all they need to do is click “Fund this bug” and punch in a dollar figure. How simple can it get? The microPledge project will be automatically created as required. Cool.

4 February 2008 by Berwyn    one comment

One comment

Ben 5 Feb 2008, 06:14 link

There are a few comments about this over at programming.reddit. IMHO the longer one by masklinn is especially helpful.

Add a comment

We reserve the right to edit or remove your comment if it’s spammy, offensive, unintelligible, or if you don’t give a valid email address. :-)

We’ll never share your email address.