Shine your keyboards, hackers of OpenStack: on February 2nd 2012 you will be called to fight the ever growing number of bugs that keep creeping in our beloved code.

On Bug Squashing Day all the OpenStack developer community will focus mainly on Nova to:

• Close old fixed bugs. Old bugs are nasty. Even when they are long dead, they clog bug views and render the lists unusable. Just look at old bugs and check if they still apply ! If they don't, close them as FixReleased (if you can pinpoint when they were fixed) or Invalid (if you can't).
• Fix bugs. The best thing you can do on a bug squashing day is to kill a live one. Just look at the list of Confirmed or Triaged and pick your target. Submit a change that fixes it. Ask for review help on the channel.
• Triage incoming bugs. It's sometimes hard to distinguish fresh bugs from false alarms. You can help by using your expertise or reproduction skills on New bugs. If you can confirm the issue, set the bug to Confirmed. If you can fix it, read the previous chapter. If you need more info from the reporter, set it to Incomplete. And if it happens to not really be valid, set it to Invalid.

You don't have to be an experienced Nova developer to participate, and we believe that February 2nd will be a great way to get started with the OpenStack community. You can get started by looking at Devstack to build your complete OpenStack development environment. The other projects are welcome to focus on quality that day but Nova is the one that will get more attention.

The event will happen in Austin and San Francisco, hosted by Rackspace with food, drinks and games. All participants are encouraged to join the dedicated #openstack-bugsquash IRC channel on Freenode for the duration of the event.

http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/01/the-first-openstack-bug-squashing-day-is-coming-on-feb-2nd/