Creating a convention for labeling tickets for community consumption

Development
1

Continuing the discussion from URGENT: We've got more developers than well-defined work!:

During the call for tickets for prospective GSoC 2016 students, we realized we could benefit from a clearer convention for labeling tickets appropriate for general community consumption.

The problem

We currently have two labels:

  • intro – trivial task requiring minimal technical skill

  • community-priority – tasks that are a priority for the OpenMRS Community (e.g., tasks important for community milestones)

intro is generally well-understood to label tickets that someone brand new to the community could tackle; however, we don’t have a convention for labeling tickets beyond the introductory level.

Goal

A simple, easily understood (ideally self-evident) scheme for labeling tickets such that people new to the community can more easily identify tickets appropriate to their level of skills & comfort with OpenMRS.

Potential solution

  • dev-null – requires little to no technical skill (equivalent to an easy intro ticket or GCI task). wouldn’t be included on a community dev sprint (too simple).

  • dev-1 – requires basic coding skills but little-to-no domain knowledge and could be accomplished in isolation (equivalent to an intro ticket that requires programming). could be an intro ticket on a community dev sprint.

  • dev-2 – requires decent coding skills and may require some basic knowledge of OpenMRS, but does not require knowledge of the module/project to accomplish. could easily be a ticket on a community dev sprint.

  • dev-3 – requires strong coding skills and would likely require coordinating work with others, may require some basic knowledge of the module/project. could be a medium-to-high level sprint ticket.

  • dev-4 – requires strong coding skills and knowledge or experience with the module/project, but could be accomplished by someone new to the module/project if they spend time researching the issue and working with dev(s) on the module/project. could be a complex ticket for a sprint.

  • dev-5 – step away from the ticket! it requires guru skills or in-depth knowledge or experience with the module/project (if you haven’t been working on this module/project, this probably isn’t for you). might be a sprint in itself.

Thoughts?

It seems intuitive to me, but, then again, I’ve been involved in dev staging from the start. I do like, however, that is doubles down on communicating & understanding dev stages in our community (i.e., making it part of our culture). What do you think?

/cc @surangak, @michael, @pascal, @harsha89

5 Likes
2

This makes perfect sense to me. I like it a lot :slight_smile:

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You can set the complexity of a ticket in jira which is very similar to what @Burke described only that it has 3 levels, i think we’ve not been utilizing this feature fully, why can’t we use it? Is it insufficient?

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I don’t think it really matters if we use labels or complexity levels - as long as we use reasonably well defined levels to indicate ticket complexity that allows developers to search for tickets at their level.

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So can someone direct me to the very basic issues.I need to get my hands and grey matter busy.Thanks alot

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Search for intro tickets in JIRA

1 Like
7

@tendomart, on the Getting Started as a Developer wiki page, you’ll find a link to introductory tickets (see #7).

1 Like
8

Thanks friends.

9

This sounds like a great way to do it!