Hi, With the upcoming migration to GitLab in mind, while reading some books, using a kanban board locally, and with the idea to make the contribution process smoother for both newcomers & long-timers, I've thought quite a bit about how we use tickets to organize our work recently.
My main conclusion so far is: I want to make it easier to determine and set the status of a ticket. Currently, the status of a Redmine ticket is built from the combination of "Status" and "QA Check"; it does not help that some of these combinations make no sense at all. I've noticed that many of us have a hard time managing these 2 fields, regardless of how long they've been contributing to Tails; so this data is very often wrong. This, plus Redmine limitations, makes it impossible at the moment to have an overview of a set of tickets, grouped by their actual status (defined by a combination of "Status" and "QA Check"). So I propose that we drop the "QA Check" field and instead, introduce a "Needs Validation" status. So a ticket would typically go through this journey: New → Confirmed → In Progress (once someone starts working on it) → Needs Validation (once it's deemed ready to be merged by the person/team who's been working on it) → Fix committed → Resolved. And if the reviewer requests changes, they would set the status back to "In Progress". The only thing we lose along the way is QA Check = "Info Needed" plus the associated reassignment dance. Removing that has only benefits IMO: - This value is very often wrong because we forget to drop it and to reassign back, after providing the requested info. - Assigning a ticket to someone else + Info Needed, merely to get some input regularly causes trouble: it makes the task invisible to the person who's requesting the info, which makes it harder to organize their work — occasionally I'll be surprised when a ticket lands back on my plate after the info is provided. And if the requested info is not provided in a timely manner, WIP can be stalled for a long time, with no easy way for the requester to notice and decide whether they should move on without that info. Given we now have "mentions" (@nickname) on our Redmine, for the majority of cases, when the requested info can presumably be provided cheaply and quickly, I think we should use mentions and not reassign the ticket. And when I'm mentioned, if I realize that providing the requested info needs will take me great amounts of work, I should do whatever works for me to track this work, be it on a new ticket or my personal offline organization tools. Thoughts? I'll be happy to implement this proposal. Cheers, -- intrigeri _______________________________________________ Tails-dev mailing list [email protected] https://www.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/tails-dev To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty email to [email protected].
