The Goal

As you look back on the Liferay Community, you can see many innovative contributions and outstanding achievements by our wider community of enthusiasts, users, customers, partners, and employees. You can also see a large ball of abused and ignored bug reports, connected to us by a big chain, limiting the utility of the reporting system and efficiency of software development on the project!

The goal of this program is to address issues (not fix them per-se, just triage them) in our issue database, especially those issues filed against past releases that may still be valid, but have been ignored for some time. We will make sure the bug still exists in recent releases, and if they do, promote them to the latest release and assign to the appropriate staff to resolve, otherwise we will close them out as fixed or not reproducible.

Of course, new issues are still coming in, however if you look at the community's recent performance, we have chopped that mountain roughly in half (from 1700 "unverified" in 2010 to 867 in 2011), which is great progress, but we've more to go. With the community's help, we can easily get that down to 0 unverified/unattended bugs. Wouldn't that be swell?  The program begins now, and continues indefinitely, and we will be actively recruiting new members as we go along. Note that this is not for the beginner on the Liferay Platform. Good judgement, technical know-how, and some Liferay experience are all needed.

Some Stats

Check out the most recent, live statistics on the Community Verifier Team by visiting our JIRA Dashboard for the team.

The Process

For a detailed description of the Community Verifier process, please read the Instructions for Participation Guide.

In general, each Community Verifier team member follows the following process:

1. Choose a ticket to work on from the dashboard list of candidate tickets (these are tickets which have been filed against prior Liferay releases and have not yet been triaged by anyone).  The dashboard shows tickets grouped by functional area, so it is best if you first choose from the area you are most familiar with!
2. Initially assess the quality of the report: is it a true bug/issue, or is it simply a question? For questions, refer to the forums.  More information needed?  Ask the submitter!
3. Adjust metadata as needed: Version information, Reproduction information, environment, component, severity, and others.  The JIRA Guidelines wiki page can help here.
4. For reproducible bugs against recent Liferay releases, assign to appropriate Liferay engineering group, or suggest the issue be closed.

That's it!

The Timeline

The Community Verifier Program is an ongoing effort across multiple Liferay releases. Many issues are filed on various releases, most of which are valid at the time they are filed, but due to the large number of community members working on the code, the structure of the project, and the passage of time, many issues are resolved without ever knowing an issue was filed. This program is therefore always in effect, and the membership and level of activity per member will vary over time. In addition, new community members arrive and old community members depart, so there will always be "knowledge leaks" that can be filled by experienced community members such as you!