As you may know, the Magento 2 repository has a lot of open issues. At the time of publication, the issue count is getting close to 1,700, which is a pretty big number! Looking into them, you will find that some issues are valid but others are less important, such as duplicates and general questions.
As a result, it's hard to find high-priority issues and general backlog management becomes messy.
The Backlog history
The Magento 2 Community backlog has been steadily growing over the past 5 years since the first release of Magento 2. As mentioned previously, there are almost 1,700 open issues. In the past few weeks, the repository has averaged 130 new open topics per week!
With such volume it’s obviously hard to manage the backlog and focus on issues that require attention. Because this backlog exists for a while, some of the issues are not valid or not reproducible, which makes it difficult for contributors to find real issues to work on.
Improving the Community Backlog
As a step forward to address some of the issues mentioned above, we will be installing the Stale bot application on the Magento 2 repository to help achieve the following goals:
- Keep the community backlog up-to-date
- Keep only relevant issues
- Keep the backlog triaged
- Keep alignment on backlog priority
- Respect community input/feedback and Magento team vision
The purpose of this bot will be to constantly monitor all open issues and close issues that don’t receive attention from the community.
The bot will work in following way:
- Find open issues that haven’t had any updates in the past 76 days
- Mark those issues as “stale” with a corresponding label and post a comment on it
- Close the issue if there is no activity over the next 14 days
In case the bot marks the reported issue as stale and you feel that the issue is still relevant, just add a comment saying that this issue is still valid and needs to be fixed. The bot will keep the issue open and will remove the "stale" label.
Important to note: the bot will ignore the following issues:
- High priority issues (for example, issues that have P0, P1, and P2 labels)
- Issues that contain links to related, unmerged PRs, Issues that are related to special projects (for example, B2B, GraphQL, etc)
More information about the configuration of this application can be found in the bot configuration file.
We believe that making the backlog cleaner will make the community more engaged and make our work more impactful! The stale bot application is a first step towards our goals, and it will improve our community experience.
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