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Title: Issue trackers are garbage (and here's why) |
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Category: Blog |
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Tags: /dev/diary, dev culture, |
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Date: 2019-10-10 |
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Status: Draft |
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> We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was |
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> us that invented **issue trackers**. At the time development was very |
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> chaotic and it was believed that they would bring **order into the |
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> chaos**. |
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Whenever I talk to people about making FOSS projects more |
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approachable, one thing that always comes up is issue trackers. "Label |
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your issues", they say, "Mark them as 'good first issue'", they |
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say. This is, of course, to make it easier for newcomers to see what |
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needs to be done, where they can help, or even just have a place to |
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ping for mentoring. |
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So far so good. |
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I will now prove that this is the only area where issue trackers are |
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good. And in fact, how this same workflow can be entirely implemented |
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in either a shared edit pad, or a mailing list. |
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## Bloat |
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The central problem of issue trackers, like with most things in life, |
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is people. People who create new issues, without searching for one |
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that already exists. People who forget about updating or closing their |
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issues or just fail to add relevant tags and write a descriptive |
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text. Who needs more than the title? |
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This results in many issue trackers accumilating so much information |
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that it becomes impossible for anyone to understand it anymore. It's |
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common for larger, long-running projects to purge their issue trackers |
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from time to time, hinting that there might be a problem in the |
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accumilation of bloat. |
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Another approach is to do "triage" regularly, meaning that the |
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update-purge cycle gets done on a smaller scale, but more |
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regularly. Other projects ignore their issue trackers, letting |
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thousands of them build up and embracing that information will be |
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duplicated. |
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Interestingly enough, vey often the people doing the most work have |
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the least interaction with issue trackers. PRs and reviews, yes, those |
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are somewhat useful tools. But issue trackers, very much not so. |
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In the end, issues become a kind of forum where people can discuss |
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their problems or ideas. Do you know what else is kinda like a forum? |
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A mailing list. |
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## Onboarding? ONBOARDING?! |
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