The Bug Squad Team has been a “ghost” Team for a long period of time, then in March 2019, an Election was held and I had the insane idea to self candidate myself to lead the team.

Unfortunately I was the only candidate, so I won the election quite easily. 

My first goal as the Team lead, has been to know, who from the old team still wants to actively contribute to team and, at the same time, looking for who i can contact to be a new member of the team, the second part has been very easy, i had to just look at github statistics, and the name of the most active contributors just pop-up in a breeze. I've started to contact a lot of people, and most of them have shown an interest to be a team member, unfortunately some people respectfully refused to be part of the team and others never responded.

So we have started having some informal meeting, one of the most hard part has been to clean the team from inactive members, i've based the concept of "inactive" members only looking at the github activities, after all the main mission of this team is to lower the number of open issues, but even then,  someone had to complain , so we have runned another internal votation, to know, if my direction was the same of the team, my line won, so i've send an email to all the old inactive members, firstly to thank them for their contribution, and asking if they still want to contribute.

So after some effort, finally we have been able to have a team made by active contributors.

Mostly due to my work experience, I've started to set some rules, as for my understanding of the main goal of this team,  we need to have a team meeting twice a month. I think that reducing the numbers of issues of a complex software like Joomla deserves quite intense effort.

For the same reason, sorry to be an pain, I've started to introduce a way to meter the team work. I've shared to the team my personal view, and basically i've started to meter based on this index :

number of:

• Pull Request merged
• Pull Request proposed
• Issue closed
• Issue opened
• Total Issue
• Total Pull request

on a month timeframe.

Another of the most important task for a Team, is to make a written report and publish the report of the meeting on the Volunteer portal shortly, and I can assure to you, that from a bad english writer like me (nor that my spoken english is better), is not an easy task, but, i can got all the shame, i'm trying to improve myself. At least for every meeting this team has held, a written report has been published on the portal, and I think that this is important, to let the community know, that someone is working/thinking on something.

After some time, we have reached some of my dream goal, we have reached a point where we have had less than 450 open  issues, starting from more than 560, currently we have more than 530 open issues, but thanks to the different way of think of my team members, now i'm more inclined to change the way i was thinking to record this statistics number, and in the same timeframe i.e a month, it's better to compare only the number of open issues versus the number of closed issues. But I'm a dreamer, so i'm not so happy, i still think we can perform better, if we can only have much more contributors.

One of the things that let me to be very proud of this team (as i am a database addicted), is that, apart of the day by day work, and if you care to take a look on github activities, you’ll  know what i mean, the members of this team, has been able to do some amazing huge work, just let me mention some silly facts:

• MySQL 8 compatibility (ie the date null)
• Sql prepared statement conversion

I don’t want to mention no one in particular, just look at yourself at the team members activities on github, cause i don't want to forget someone.

I wish we can meet in person at one of the next community events, to say thank you for your help to let this team up and running again as it is supposed to be for the benefit of the whole community.

We are still looking for active contributors, so if you care about joomla and want this project to have less bugs, please join, we are open to active contributors.