Team Spotlight: The jQuery Bug Triage Team

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Allow me to introduce the bug triage team with a chart:

Over the past 60 days, the bug triage team has taken an unwieldy hairy mess of tickets and addressed every single one of them.

Yes that’s right; as it stands, there are zero unreviewed tickets in the jQuery issue tracker. The last one to be closed was a rather malodorous bug.

The jQuery Bug Triage team are a group of jQuery core and community members who actively assist in narrowing down and patching bugs submitted on the jQuery bug tracker. Between them this team have a number of years worth of experience in debugging and fixing both JavaScript and jQuery issues. When you submit a bug, feature request or enhancement request to the project, they’re the team that looks at your tickets.

The team members are:

  • Dave Methvin is co-founder of PC Pitstop, jQuery user since 2005, and on the jQuery core team.
  • Addy Osmani is a London-based User-interface developer at Aol as well as a regular jQuery blogger.
  • Colin Snover is an independent software designer and developer based out of Minneapolis.
  • Rick Waldron is Head of Research and Development at Bocoup in Boston, MA
  • Alex Sexton is a Labs Engineer at Bazaarvoice in Austin TX, and a co-host of the yayQuery podcast.
  • Adam J Sontag is a NYC-based developer for Bocoup, and a co-host of the yayQuery podcast.
  • Mike Taylor works for Opera Software and sometimes gets hit by cars on his bike.
  • Dan Heberden is a web consultant based in Portland, Oregon and is on the jQuery UI team
  • Anton Matzneller is a computer science student and developer located in Vienna, Austria.

We all owe these guys a good amount of thanks. They’ve done a tremendous amount of work to benefit jQuery.

<== jQuery heroes

Now, some other news from the development front…

New (and undocumented) Features

jQuery.readyWait
Introduced in jQuery 1.4.3 was a counter called readyWait. This provides a way for control flow to get to a point where registered ready() handlers are invoked.

Event Map Support Extended
.live(), .die(), .delegate() and .undelegate() now support maps of events as a parameter in the same manner that bind and unbind currently do.

Overrides available for .getData(), .setData() and .changeData()
As mentioned in the jQuery 1.4.3 release notes we previously provided two events, setData and getData (broadcast whenever data is set or retrieved through the .data() method). In the latest versions of jQuery you are actually able to override these events in order to provide alternative behavior for those features. For example, you can return a different value or prevent a particular value being set.

Regressions

We determined that a regression was introduced in 1.4.3 which limited the use of attr() to nodeType 1 DOM element nodes. Although this was fixed in 1.4.4, attr(name) and attr(name, value) still fail in specific circumstances. We are targeting a fix for this to land in jQuery 1.4.5.

jQuery UI Bug Tracker Updated

The jQuery UI Bug tracker recently received the same enhancements as jQuery Core from Mr. Colin Snover and you can now find the same great voting and tracking options for submitting bugs, features and enhancement requests as you can on the jQuery Core tracker. This will make it significantly more easy for you to find out when we’ve taken a look at your ticket so you can follow-up in case there are any additional questions or updates regarding fixes.

Tips For jQuery Bug Patching

jQuery has quite an active development community and from time to time our community members wish to patch bugs or issues they’ve discovered for submission to the project for review.

If this sounds like something you would like to get involved in, we’ve put together a commented build file (courtesy of Rick Waldron) that will help you get setup for patching bugs using a LAMP or MAMP stack. You can download this build file via a gist. If you have questions on how to get setup, please feel free to leave a comment on the gist above or ask us about it in the #jquery IRC channel.

(Thx to Addy Osmani, who drafted much of this post for me :)

17 thoughts on “Team Spotlight: The jQuery Bug Triage Team

  1. That’s also an amazing graph. It goes from just under 130 open tickets to around 500, while still maintaining a downward slope. Awesome.

  2. Damn great job jQers! Amazing how you find the time to do all this. You must have flaming fingers or something. As a related post, can you suggest some tips for us “standing on the shoulders of giants” developers, of ways we can get more done in the limited time we seem to always run out of? And it would also be helpful if you have any tips on how / what you use for debugging & troubleshooting JavaScript errors. The cryptic “is null or not an object” messages are pretty lameand I figure there must be some better way. Even debugbar and firebug don’t seem to illuminate what’s going on under the hood, unless I don’t know how to fully use them. It’s Thanksgiving here in the states, and I’d like to say Thank You for jQuery!

  3. DEUScronio on said:

    Greetings from Portugal.

    A Big Thanks to all of you.

    Please continue helping the community.

  4. This web site is really a walk-via for all the information you needed about this and didn’t know who to ask. Glimpse here, and also you’ll definitely uncover it.