GH Issues Pilot Week 4 Retrospective Thread

[R.A. Porter]

Please note: if you have issues with the switch to GH Issues such as missing functionality that is causing you workflow problems, please respond to this thread with them. We can't improve the experience if we don't get feedback; if there is a show-stopper problem that isn't reported, it might never be addressed.

Several weeks in and from my perspective things are going well with GH Issues.

Positives

• I have noticed an overall improvement to the quality of issues being reported. Descriptions are more complete and are generally providing enough detail that the can be understood without much back and forth in comments.
• The new Issue templates have helped a little to provide structure.
• The documentation and repo meta projects do a good job of keeping related, coordinated work in one place..

Negatives

• There have still been a lot of just-in-time issues being created prior to a PR being submitted. For bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and small changes that's fine; for new functionality, it reduces the amount of refinement and design discussion that occurs prior to engineering effort. Sometimes that means engineers end up re-writing swaths of functionality, wasting time that could have been saved if the reporter had started an architectural discussion on the issue thread prior to implementing their solution. At its worst, this can lead to subpar implementations/solutions being merged to the codebase because of downstream pressures and the fallacy of sunk costs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy).
• Contributors currently cannot assign themselves to issues, add issues to projects, or add/edit labels. We are looking at ways to remedy this - bots for assigning and label maintenance and possibly adding default labels to some/all of our issue templates - but for now it requires committer intervention. In order to assist with that, we suggest engineers comment on issues when they are going to start working on them.
• The pilot GH project - the catchall for work not in documentation or repository metadata - was a bust. It held no value whatsoever. Other than those two cases, we have not yet found any open-ended work that makes sense as a project. We expect the "right" use case for GH projects is for epics, so if anyone has any epic-level work coming up please let us know and we can run a trial of that.

I hope that if anyone has any criticisms - constructive or otherwise - they will reply to this thread to let us know. It seems more and more likely that we'll remove the "Pilot" designation from this and make it a permanent changeover in the next month or two unless any serious problems are raised and cannot be resolved/worked around.

-Richard

[Brandan Jeter]

Have we put any thought into how to handle release notes with Github Issues? We have been using the JIRA Confluence macro to show custom lists of issues for release notes (see the link below for reference). From what I could tell, there were Github macros for Confluence but they cost money.

For now, I just put a Github link in the release notes that is filtering on issues for the release's milestone (I had to go through and update all the appropriate tickets to have the correct milestone).

Most recent DDF Release Notes, for reference: https://codice.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DDF/pages/649461761/DDF+2.13.6+Release+Notes

[Richard Porter]

A few of us have discussed moving to a manually curated changelog; I'd think doing our release notes manually as well would fit right along with that.

Definitely a topic that should be investigated in more detail.

-Richard

Get Outlook for Android

---

From: ddf-dev...@googlegroups.com <ddf-dev...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Brandan Jeter <branda...@connexta.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2019 1:43:53 PM
To: ddf-developers
Subject: Re: GH Issues Pilot Week 4 Retrospective Thread

 

Have we put any thought into how to handle release notes with Github Issues? We have been using the JIRA Confluence macro to show custom lists of issues for release notes (see the link below for reference). From what I could tell, there were Github macros for Confluence but they cost money.

For now, I just put a Github link in the release notes that is filtering on issues for the release's milestone (I had to go through and update all the appropriate tickets to have the correct milestone).

Most recent DDF Release Notes, for reference: https://codice.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DDF/pages/649461761/DDF+2.13.6+Release+Notes

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[rick....@connexta.com]

I'm very in favor of moving more toward a more curated changelog/release notes. Ultimately, reporting out at the issue level is really not helpful for an external audience, so we need to have some human judgement going into what we decide is "newsworthy" for a given release. I also think we could streamline both the process of generating those notes and the process of getting those notes out and in front of people who would find them useful.

Rick