Following up on the blog post from our maintainer Ihor Sviziev, that was a first step towards our goal to have a cleaner and well-maintained backlog. The Stale Bot GitHub application is already monitoring and handling the issues that have been inactive for a long period of time in the Magento 2 repository.
What is the next step?
We always encourage our partners and customers to run their instances on the latest version, which guarantees the most up to date features, bug fixes, and security fixes are available. To reduce the cost of upgrading to a newer version and make the upgrade process easier, we do our best to keep our changes backwards compatible.
The latest Magento version as of now is 2.4.1 and moving forward we will be focusing on the 2.4 and 2.5 release lines. As a result of such an approach, we will be parking the delivery of bug fixes or features for the 2.3 line and only delivering security fixes to it.
Ok, but what do the Magento release lines have to do with the backlog? Well, it has a lot to do with it! Currently, we have more than 360 issues in our backlog that have not been triaged and are confirmed on the 2.3 release line only. That represents approximately 22% of all the issues in our backlog. Based on this, we decided that we need a process to evaluate and triage these issues on the current release line.
Triage, triage, triage!
We have created a process internally to help us handle this piece of our backlog. Our goal with this process is to highlight the most important issues by prioritizing them and archiving issues that are not relevant or not reproduceable. The result of this process will have a similar impact as our first step towards cleaning the backlog. It will help our contributors focus on issues that will bring the most value to the community.
During this process, mistakes can happen. We are aware that priority is subjective, but we are open to discussion and happy to hear your point of view! If you would like to help us set the most precise priority or if you think that some priorities should be changed, we encourage you to comment on the issue and express your thoughts.
Also, it is important to highlight that our Community Engineering Team has the public Community Contributions Triage meetings, twice a week! We will be happy to have you there contributing for a cleaner and well-maintained backlog!
You can find more information on the topics of this post at:
Let's Keep the Magento 2 Backlog Clean - Part 1
Magento DevDocs – Community Backlog Priority
PHP 7.4 support for Magento 2.3.x release line
