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Q&A: Ask OpenMRS
Discussion: OpenMRS Talk
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This is a mechanism by which people involved in OpenMRS Development can progress from a new community member (/dev/null
) to a development guru (/dev/5
) as their development skills progress. The purpose of developer stages is to help clarify where people are in their journey, motivate people to become increasingly skilled in OpenMRS development, and help us recognize when people are becoming more skilled with OpenMRS Development. Developer stages are not meant to create a bureaucratic process around community privileges.
The table below gives you a high level view of the criteria, expectations, and priveleges for each stage. This worksheet, which is a work in progress, provides more details about the specific skills each stage needs to meet these criteria and expectations.
Stage | Criteria | Expectations | Privileges | Example Role(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|
/dev/null "Noob" |
How to Earn: See /dev/null badge on Talk | Community members are expected to be nice. We're all in this together!
|
|
|
/dev/1 "Beginner" |
How to Earn: See /dev/1 badge on Talk | A beginner is expected to have engaged with OpenMRS development.
|
|
|
/dev/2 "Coder" |
How to Earn: See How Developer Stages Work | A coder is expected to be able to make meaningful contributions to OpenMRS development.
|
|
|
/dev/3 "Skilled" |
How to Earn: See How Developer Stages Work | A skilled coder is expected to be able to think beyond their own needs or their organization's needs, including how their code affects others in the community and able to coordinate community contributions.
|
|
|
/dev/4 "Expert" |
How to Earn: See How Developer Stages Work | An expert is expected to be capable of thinking outside the box, understand complex technical concepts, and coordinate efforts across projects.
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/dev/5 "Guru" |
How to Earn: See How Developer Stages Work | Gurus are expected not only to be able to make significant contributions to complex projects, but also lead the development of them.
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4 Comments
Michael Downey
I think the most practical/useful way to track and monitor these stages (whatever they work out to be) would be to create in Discourse (OpenMRS Talk) both "task badges" and "dev stage badges".
In other words, create a badge for the various criteria (introduced themselves, claimed a JIRA issue, PR merged) and then create a badge, i.e. "/dev/1" that watched for people who had the necessary combination of those requisite task badges. This would allow us to do things like (A or B or C) and (D and E) and also add in the time minimums to prevent people grinding through all the stages instantly without any community bonding period.
In order to monitor external services, some of these specific criteria (e.g., JIRA issues, GitHub activity) will require either a new custom Ruby-based Discourse plugin or (in the case of GitHub) improving upon the existing one.
Darius Jazayeri
Perhaps a standalone micro-application could calculate and update these statuses via REST APIs to discourse and GitHub.
Shreyans Sheth
Darius Jazayeri, Michael Downey We've had several developers in the last 3 months (including me, hope that's not too shameless
) who have crossed the dev/1 bar and have reached the threshold value of dev/2. Maybe we can start actively assigning these badges again so that when we have a relatively new developer and he/she gets promoted, there is a feeling of accomplishment and a drive to contribute more. Just my thoughts 
Also, I'm sure quite a few have take the dev 1 quiz but I think have not been assigned badges/intimated of how they have fared. I took the test 2 weeks ago and I'm pretty sure I didn't flunk
Michael Downey
I agree; I'd love to see more /dev/2's out there! Personally I'm not clear about the technical process for promotion to /dev/2. Perhaps someone else can respond about that?
Regarding /dev/null to /dev/1, I know we had quite a backlog of quizzes at the turn of the year, and they are currently graded manually by Saptarshi Purkayastha.
But I have confirmed he is working his way through the backlog and will be granting the Smart Developer badge as soon as he's done with the first wave.