From Neglected to Community-Driven: Reviving Percona Toolkit

Percona Toolkit is one of the most widely used toolsets in the MySQL ecosystem. Thousands of DBAs and DevOps engineers rely on it daily.

When I took ownership of Percona Toolkit in 2022, I expected to add a few requested features for the Percona Support team. Instead, I found years of backlog, disabled regression tests, outdated terminology, and a community unsure whether their pull requests would ever be reviewed.

Contribution process was broken.

Many community patches didn’t meet internal coding standards. Some lacked tests. Some needed refactoring. If you maintain open-source software, you’ve seen this before.

It would have been easy to close them and move on. Instead, I chose a different path.

By restoring regression testing in the release process, reviewing pull requests consistently, clearly communicating expectations, and working collaboratively with contributors to refine their patches, we transformed Percona Toolkit into a genuinely community-driven project.

The results:

Higher-quality pull requests

Faster bug resolution

Long-requested features delivered

Reduced backlog without increasing headcount

In this talk, I will share practical lessons for maintainers and contributors:

How to make it easier to merge imperfect patches

How to guide contributors toward your standards instead of rejecting them

How process and communication can dramatically improve contribution quality

How to scale a mature open-source project without scaling the team

If you maintain open-source software, or contribute to it, this talk will show how communication, not code, can be your most powerful engineering tool.