Special events

Overview

Part of our development process are some special events that are organized from time to time. The main idea behind these is to get people together to work on Plone at the same time, both as it is more efficient as you can get immediate feedback and as it is certainly more fun to work with others.

What is a Bug Day?

From time to time, especially in the weeks leading up to a release, the Plone Community arranges so-called "Bug Days". These days focus on identifying and fixing bugs and other issues with the Plone core, and is an excellent chance to get to know both Plone and its developers better. We therefor get together on IRC and collectively fix a selected set of bugs.

The Bug-Wrangler is the person who determines what bugs needs to be fixed and prioritizes as well as allocates bugs to each individual developer. Bug Day's happen in many other open source projects. Anyone can participate in a bug day; general users who are comfortable with using Subversion can test that a developer has fixed a bug or that the user can not provoke the bug in a different manner. And no matter what your current skill level is - from totally new to Plone to experienced Plone developer - you can make a difference!

Bug days are a critical development and social event that brings the developers closer through producively exorcising software of evil bugs. Bug days are usually announced on the developer mailing list and on the frontpage of plone.org.

What is a Sprint?

Tres Seaver originally came up with this idea. While a bug day lasts only one day or a weekend and people usually meet online, a Sprint typically lasts for several days to a full week and people meet in person. The idea of a Sprint is for a group of people to enhance, create, or fix one or more pieces of infrastructure. Usually they are focused on a specific set of topics instead of the entire product line.

Sprints are either funded by organizations or individuals who need specific features or are interested in working on some. Sprints happen yearly in the Plone community from sunny San Francisco to the top of mountains in the Alps where the only electricity is produced by a generator and a satellite uplink is used for internet connectivity. Sprints are extremly productive cultural events in the world of Plone. You can have a look at the list of past and upcoming Sprints.

What is a Symposium/Conference?

This is not a special kind of event for Plone or the open source world, but exactly what happens in other businesses as well. Usually there is one official Plone conference per year and at least one regional Symosium. Most of the time there is a business and a development orientated track each consisting of a series of talks and tutorials. See the events section for past and upcoming events.