Michael Prasuhn on contributing to the Project module

Michael Prasuhn (aka "mikey_p") talks how he got involved with helping out with the project module after feeling like he wanted to make more of an impact than working in Drupal core by working on a contributed module that would definitely be used by a lot of people. Prasuhn found that the Project.module was a perfect candidate and talks about some of the different tasks that he's been working on including adding a new severity level status of "major" to tickets in the Drupal.org issue queue.

He cites a recent drupal.org post from Dries where he said:

To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

As Prasuhn notes, adding a new severity classification could provide a more reasonable middle-ground for current tickets that aren't quite 'critical' but more important than 'normal.' Downgrading a lot of critical issues to the level of 'major' could potentially affect the release of Drupal 7 since the way to track when it is ready to be released is when the number of critical issues in Drupal 7 issue queue approaches zero.