The following is a summary of the Triage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Team meeting for Monday, March 11, 2019 that took place in the #core room of the Making WordPress Core Slack instance. A full transcript of the meeting can be found here. For more information about the Triage Team, check out the initial blog post.
Primary Goals
The primary goal of the team is to go through all open tickets in Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. to review, triage, and prioritize each one, bringing the number of open tickets down as a result.
While this process is ongoing, recommendations for improvements to the documentation and/or ticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. workflow (such as a new keyword) can be made to make the process go more smoothly, but this should be secondary.
Team Members
Anyone can be a part of the team! But, a few people have stepped up to help lead this effort: @desrosj, @chriscct7, @SergeyBiryukov, @karmatosed, and @designsimply. All are available for any questions related to this effort. These team members are in place to make sure that all disciplines are represented in this effort.
Component maintainers are also great resources for help and guidance. A full list of component maintainers can be found here.
Who Can Triage Tickets?
The term Bug Gardener has been used in the past. Triaging and Bug Gardening are really the same things. The team was created to coordinate the effort of going through all open tickets. But, anyone can triage tickets.
Here are tasks that need to be performed on every open ticket:
- For bugs, test to verify that they are still happening in the latest version of WordPress.
- Check that the purpose of the ticket is still relevant/valid (changes introduced elsewhere after the ticket was opened may – have rendered some tickets unnecessary).
- Make sure the ticket has enough information to be properly evaluated.
- Make sure the keywords on the ticket are accurate.
- Test patches to make sure they still apply to
trunk. - Test patches to make sure they still fix the issue.
You can also create patches if that is in your skillset. Any effort to resolve or move a ticket along.
If you are a component maintainer and want some help going through your tickets with component contributors, reach out to one of the team members mentioned above and a date and time can be set for a ticket scrub.
Where to Start?
Getting started will depend on your own personal level of comfort. Here are some areas to jump in.
Newer Contributors
More Seasoned Contributors
- If you are a committer A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component., tickets marked
commit. - Tickets requiring developer feedback.
- The Ancient Ticket Report.
If you are a component maintainer or frequent contributor to a specific component, working through a component’s ticket backlog is also a great place to start. Being highly familiar with parts of Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. will help when going through those lists.
Some Tips
- If you have follow up questions for the person that opened the ticket, make sure to use the
reporter-feedback keyword. - If you are unable to reproduce an issue or think a ticket should be closed but want to give others a chance to weigh in, use the
close keyword. - If you think all aspects of the proposed changes have been considered and a ticket is ready, add the
commit keyword. - Make sure
has-patch, has-unit-tests and needs-patch, needs-unit-tests keywords are correctly assigned for each ticket. - If the ticket needs UI User interface/UX User experience feedback, use the
needs-design-feedback keyword. - If a ticket needs a specific design, use the
needs-design keyword.
Tracking Efforts
If you are planning to contribute time to this effort, please comment below or inform one of the team members noted at the beginning that you are taking part. This allows the team’s progress to be accurately tracked.
Next Meeting
There are no further team meetings planned at this time. When the need for one arises, a date and time will be posted accompanied by an agenda.
Happy triaging!
#triage-team
