We have a beautiful, welcoming page ([[ https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_little_bugs | Annoying Little Bugs ]]) showcasing a list of projects, each linked to a list of easy tasks on Phabricator. IMO, the problem is that for a new developer, finding that first bug to work on from this resource can be a bit time consuming and frustrating experience. The reason being that there are way too many options to choose from and most of the bugs in there are either old, not self-contained, has already a patch for review, a team or an individual is working on it, misses getting started instructions, etc. Also, from tracking newcomer activity perspective, there isn’t any process to know if newcomers are working on our bugs, and what have they been able to accomplish!
There has been some research done to use sentiment analysis/machine learning to predict software bugs or their fixability. Taking inspiration from the research in this space, I envision a tool or process that helps periodically generate a list of five tasks from “Annoying Little Bugs” that are “really” easy, valid, and ready for new developers to jump right in!
Either there be:
* A tool to score a bug probably using sentiment analysis (considering the factors such as the text in the title, age of the bug, who is working on it, is there a dedicated mentor for it, contains getting started steps, etc.)
* A non-technical process operated by humans; not too cumbersome to generate such a list
Research papers
* http://thesai.org/Downloads/Volume9No2/Paper_12-Software_Bug_Prediction_using_Machine_Learning.pdf
* http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.baztech-aca61940-c405-4828-be27-f870125e4613
* https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/41145.pdf
See also
* https://wiki.mozilla.org/Good_first_bug#Mentored_Bugs
* https://wiki.mozilla.org/BugsAhoy
* https://medium.freecodecamp.org/finding-your-first-open-source-project-or-bug-to-work-on-1712f651e5ba
(If you would like to brainstorm on this topic or have any ideas how to implement it, come and talk to me!)