Priorities in Monorail (issue tracker)

[Logan Hanks]

Hey repo-discuss,

TL;DR: I want to rename our Priority levels in Monorail from words (Blocker/Critical/Major/Minor/Trivial) to numbers (0/1/2/3/4/5).

I've been working with Andrew Bonventre over the past couple of weeks to organize all the open issues that have been filed against the PolyGerrit component in Monorail[1]. The main thing we wanted to accomplish was to ensure that every issue has a Priority, and that all issues above a certain level of Priority have assigned owners who can work on them.

This process works best when the ordering of priorities is obvious. With the names we currently have, it's not clear. It's obvious that "Major" is more important than "Minor", but how does that compare to "Blocking"? Where does "Critical" fall?

I'd like to propose moving to a simple numeric system instead:

Priority-0     = Blocks development or production
Priority-1     = Crashes, loss of data, severe memory leak
Priority-2     = Major loss of function
Priority-3     = Minor loss of function or easy workaround is present
Priority-4     = Cosmetic problem like misspelt words or misaligned text

These numbers have special meaning to developers under the PolyGerrit component. A Priority-0 issue is one that the entire team should be working on to fix immediately. A Priority-1 issue usually has a single owner, but it's that owner's top priority. Priority-2 issues are all remaining issues that we can assign to an owner to be resolved in the near term. The remaining priority levels are holding areas for issues we're not ready to work on yet, but might someday (in which case we'll bump up the priority and assign an owner).

If there is consensus in favor of this change, I can update the label configuration in Monorail accordingly, and update the labels for all open issues without sending emails.

If there isn't consensus, we can continue working with the verbal priority levels, but I think their meaning will be less clear to people filing issues.

Thanks,

Logan

1. All open PolyGerrit issues: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/gerrit/issues/list?can=2&q=component%3APolyGerrit&sort=&groupby=Pri&colspec=ID+Type+Stars+Milestone+Status+Pri+Owner+Summary

[Björn Pedersen]

Hi,

generally I think it could be beneficial. But I am not sure if purely numeric labels are good to understand for all users (depending on cultural background, a Prio-0 may be considered a very low priority.) So maybe use a combination:

0-Blocker
1-Critical
.....

Björn

[David Pursehouse]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 4:11 PM 'Björn Pedersen' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi,

generally I think it could be beneficial. But I am not sure if purely numeric labels are good to understand for all users (depending on cultural background, a Prio-0 may be considered a very low priority.) So maybe use a combination:

Typically it's the project maintainers who set the priority, so as long as there is a common understanding among them it should be OK.

Note that we also have the "Blocking-" labels, which are separate from the priority.

 

0-Blocker
1-Critical
.....

Björn

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[Edwin Kempin]

I'm fine with using numbers for priorities.

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 9:33 AM, David Pursehouse <david.pu...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 4:11 PM 'Björn Pedersen' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi,

generally I think it could be beneficial. But I am not sure if purely numeric labels are good to understand for all users (depending on cultural background, a Prio-0 may be considered a very low priority.) So maybe use a combination:

Typically it's the project maintainers who set the priority, so as long as there is a common understanding among them it should be OK.

Note that we also have the "Blocking-" labels, which are separate from the priority.

0-Blocker
1-Critical
.....

Björn

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[Nasser Grainawi]

On Aug 16, 2016, at 1:53 AM, 'Edwin Kempin' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I'm fine with using numbers for priorities.

Fine with me too (not that I've spent all that much time in the issue tracker recently).

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[Logan Hanks]

Thanks everyone who responded. I've gone ahead and made this change (and hopefully I didn't forget to uncheck "send email" on any of my batch edits). I've relabelled all currently open issues. Closed issues will continue to carry the verbal priority labels.

Logan

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[David Pursehouse]

While we're talking about the issue tracker, does anyone object if the default sorting of the list is changed to be in descending order of ID?  This way the newest issues will be at the top.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 7:05 AM Logan Hanks <lo...@google.com> wrote:

Thanks everyone who responded. I've gone ahead and made this change (and hopefully I didn't forget to uncheck "send email" on any of my batch edits). I've relabelled all currently open issues. Closed issues will continue to carry the verbal priority labels.

Logan

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 2:44 PM, Nasser Grainawi <nas...@codeaurora.org> wrote:

On Aug 16, 2016, at 1:53 AM, 'Edwin Kempin' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I'm fine with using numbers for priorities.

Fine with me too (not that I've spent all that much time in the issue tracker recently).

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 9:33 AM, David Pursehouse <david.pu...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 4:11 PM 'Björn Pedersen' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi,

generally I think it could be beneficial. But I am not sure if purely numeric labels are good to understand for all users (depending on cultural background, a Prio-0 may be considered a very low priority.) So maybe use a combination:

Typically it's the project maintainers who set the priority, so as long as there is a common understanding among them it should be OK.

Note that we also have the "Blocking-" labels, which are separate from the priority.

0-Blocker
1-Critical
.....

Björn

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[Logan Hanks]

The current order is by Milestone, then descending Stars, then descending ID.

Milestone is rarely used (only 8 out of 1709 open issues), so I doubt anyone would miss sorting by Milestone.

That leaves Stars vs. ID. Personally, I'm in favor of sorting by ID. Does anyone want to make the case for sorting primarily by Stars?

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 8:56 AM, David Pursehouse <david.pu...@gmail.com> wrote:

While we're talking about the issue tracker, does anyone object if the default sorting of the list is changed to be in descending order of ID?  This way the newest issues will be at the top.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 7:05 AM Logan Hanks <lo...@google.com> wrote:

Thanks everyone who responded. I've gone ahead and made this change (and hopefully I didn't forget to uncheck "send email" on any of my batch edits). I've relabelled all currently open issues. Closed issues will continue to carry the verbal priority labels.

Logan

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 2:44 PM, Nasser Grainawi <nas...@codeaurora.org> wrote:

On Aug 16, 2016, at 1:53 AM, 'Edwin Kempin' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I'm fine with using numbers for priorities.

Fine with me too (not that I've spent all that much time in the issue tracker recently).

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 9:33 AM, David Pursehouse <david.pu...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 4:11 PM 'Björn Pedersen' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi,

generally I think it could be beneficial. But I am not sure if purely numeric labels are good to understand for all users (depending on cultural background, a Prio-0 may be considered a very low priority.) So maybe use a combination:

Typically it's the project maintainers who set the priority, so as long as there is a common understanding among them it should be OK.

Note that we also have the "Blocking-" labels, which are separate from the priority.

0-Blocker
1-Critical
.....

Björn

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[Björn Pedersen]

Yes, sorting by ID seems reasonable. Personally Isort by lastupdated (you have to enable this column first) so I which tickets have new information as well. But this is probably not  good default.

Björn

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[David Pursehouse]

I've changed the config to sort by descending issue ID.

[Shawn Pearce]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 4:39 PM, 'Logan Hanks' via Repo and Gerrit Discussion <repo-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hey repo-discuss,

TL;DR: I want to rename our Priority levels in Monorail from words (Blocker/Critical/Major/Minor/Trivial) to numbers (0/1/2/3/4/5).

I've been working with Andrew Bonventre over the past couple of weeks to organize all the open issues that have been filed against the PolyGerrit component in Monorail[1]. The main thing we wanted to accomplish was to ensure that every issue has a Priority, and that all issues above a certain level of Priority have assigned owners who can work on them.

This process works best when the ordering of priorities is obvious. With the names we currently have, it's not clear. It's obvious that "Major" is more important than "Minor", but how does that compare to "Blocking"? Where does "Critical" fall?

I'd like to propose moving to a simple numeric system instead:

Priority-0     = Blocks development or production
Priority-1     = Crashes, loss of data, severe memory leak
Priority-2     = Major loss of function
Priority-3     = Minor loss of function or easy workaround is present
Priority-4     = Cosmetic problem like misspelt words or misaligned text

Googlers generally work with this 0-4 scheme, but with a bit more detail than written above to explain what number to apply to an issue. I've tried to expand on this in a change for gerritcodereview.com ... see https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/84690.