On Issue Management (braindump edition)

Discussions Ideas
#1

Issues put stress on people. I want to brain dump my thoughts in this topic. Happy to branch out into several new ones (I don’t have the time to do that right now, because baby care). I apologise for jumping back and forth in advance. I have to break this topic up into smaller chunks, because „new users can use at most two links”…

I learned that since I’ve read What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer | Read the Tea Leaves

To workaround the psychological pressure, some folks developed hacks. Take Lodash for example:

In case the linked Twitter thread goes offline, here’s the excerpt:

  • Feature requests are closed issues with feature label and votes needed label, and a :+1: emoji reaction
  • Bugs are open issues tagged with bug label

To see current feature requests, he provides a link that shows all issues labeled feature, sorted by descending count of :+1:.

That’s how he prioritizes new feature development, so everyone knows the “most important” thing to work on next.

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#2

But even labels are a crutch. They carry information in a structured format, because GitHub offers not enough fields to track those:

Others auto-close issues after some time. This could be considered harmful:

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#3

Structured formats allow for an ecosystem to evolve around issue management. Perhaps you encountered waffle.io in the last decade (before it shut down):
https://projectmanagernews.com/general/what-happened-to-waffle-io/

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#4

Or you participated at Hacktoberfest and were directed to https://up-for-grabs.net/ or https://goodfirstissue.dev/

I feel like this is something we should have in one way or another.

#5

My highest pain point is the unavailability offline. Here something like Git-issue: Git-based decentralized issue management might help.

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#6

Sure, there is integration of, say Visual Studio Code with GitHub:

I believe, they’ve stolen that from Atom:

But it still requires an Internet connection (Germany has way too many white spots on the connectivity map, that I’d bet on this …).

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#7

Last item, I promise:

I used to use notifications by mail (back when I was using GoogleMail because Google+).
It had the upside of shipping with header fields, I could use for filtering:

Sadly, most e-mail providers don’t allow to define filters on them (so I’d need to do that client-side, e.g. using Claws Mail).

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