Ubuntu Wiki

Karmic Cycle

For Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala,” the Canonical User Experience and Design team, together with community members participating in the Ayatana project, attempted to identify and fix one hundred “paper cuts.” Briefly put, a paper cut was defined as a trivially fixable usability bug that the average user would encounter on his/her first day of using a default installation of Ubuntu Desktop Edition.

The One Hundred Paper Cuts project was announced at UDS Karmic in Barcelona and proceeded in the following five phases:

1. The preliminary definition of a paper cut was blogged about and posted on the Ubuntu wiki (http://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut), and the community was invited to report paper cuts and to identify existing bugs as paper cuts in Launchpad. Project details were publicized on Ubuntu members' personal blogs, aggregated on Ubuntu Planet and Planet GNOME, and announced on the Ayatana and Ubuntu-devel mailing lists.

2. Within a few weeks, over 1,600 bugs were added to the “papercuts” project in Launchpad. A new team named “papercutters” was formed to triage incoming bugs and generate a set of confirmed bugs which had been checked against the definition of a paper cut. The papercutters team initially consisted of the Canonical User Experience and Design team, but five members of the community were eventually added to the team after demonstrating a strong understanding of the project through bug triage work.
3. Ten weekly milestones, beginning the final week of June and ending the final week of August, were scheduled, with ten paper cuts allocated to each milestone to establish the preliminary set of one hundred paper cuts to fix in the Ubuntu 9.10 release. This series of milestones was intended as a schedule for the Canonical Design team to observe when collaborating with Ubuntu developers and the community, allowing the Design team to focus on a small set of paper cuts each week; these milestones were never intended to be deadlines for fixing bugs. Celeste Lyn Paul was added to the papercutters team to assist in allocating an additional Kubuntu paper cut to each milestone so that the Kubuntu project could also benefit from the paper cuts effort.
4. Each week, a new milestone and therefore a fresh set of ten paper cuts would become the focus of attention. The Canonical Design team would sometimes provide design direction when it was needed in the form of mockups or simple behavioral specifications as comments on bugs, but most effort was spent finding individuals capable and willing to work on implementing fixes, as paper cuts by definition require very little specialized design work. As closer attention was paid to paper cuts within each successive milestone, often a paper cut would become contentious, or it would become apparent that a paper cut was not easy to fix, so the offending paper cut would be marked Invalid and replaced within its milestones with another unallocated, Confirmed paper cut. At the end of each week, a progress report was published that discussed the paper cuts examined that week and celebrated the progress of any paper cuts that had been fixed.

For Lucid

1. Paper cut gets a patch attached.
2. UX checks off on experience.
3. Subscribe “ubuntu-main-sponsors” and assign to "canonical-desktop-team"
4. Desktop team helps submitter work with upstream and simultaneously apply patch to Ubuntu.

Psychological effect of marking paper cuts invalid. Paper cut escalation: How we discourage hundreds of comments. Share Paper Cut filter (imapfilter).

Phase 1: Discovery Phase 2: UX assignment Phase 3: