The aim of ticket gardening is to ensure that items tracked on GitLab stay relevant and contain helpful information for bringing a task to completion. To achieve this goal contributors and teams need to be made aware of the existence of issues that need their input so they can self-organize and prioritize their work. Issues that are not relevant anymore should be closed.

This work should be done every quarter.

  1. Tasks
    1. Manual tasks
      1. Go through relevant GitLab views
      2. Identify and fix inadequate milestone
    2. Automated tasks
      1. Stalled WIP
      2. Stalled validation
      3. Stalled merge requests

Tasks

Manual tasks

Go through relevant GitLab views

  • T:Wait label: check if what was blocking was eventually resolved outside of Tails. Issues should either have an assignee, their T: label requalified, be rejected, or stay in this state.

  • WIP without assignee: identify issues that have a majority of work completed and could somewhat easily be finished. Create a list of those issues and send them to the responsible team; if that team cannot handle these issues, set the status label to something other than Doing.

Identify and fix inadequate milestone

Some issues are missed by our automated setup. These issues are those whose milestone has been postponed after the N last releases by the Release Manager: every such milestone bump counts as an update so there's no chance the issue will ever be identified as stalled. Hence we need to manually identify these issues and remove their milestone.

To select the corresponding issues:

  1. List issues in the tails group

  2. Filter the list to only include issues whose milestone is set to the next Tails release.

  3. Filter the list to only include issues that were postponed at least twice in a row by the RM: they have missed:$version labels.

Criteria

Situations when dropping the milestone would be inadequate:

  • If the issue was (re)assigned to the assignee recently.

  • If there's been progress but it's not documented on the issue.

  • If it's part of a sponsor deliverable.

    • If the official deadline is in the future, most of the time we don't want to touch the milestone.

Whether it's appropriate to drop the milestone depends on:

  • When the last action on the issue by the assignee was performed. For example, if they did not update the issue since 3 months or more.

  • If the issue was recently postponed be the RM and not by the assignee themselves — the latter would suggest they have it in mind and are updating their plans.

  • Whether there's an assignee. If there's none but the issue was postponed a few times, then:

    • Either it's important and it should be put on the plate of a core team.

    • Or it's unimportant and the milestone should be dropped: keeping it has little value. If someone wants to track those issues, there surely are better ways.

  • Whether the issue is blocked by anything (other issues or what not) that's out of the hands of the assignee.

  • How safe/privileged is the assignee's position in Tails. For contributors that hold more power than average we can assume they know how to revert our changes.

Template comment

We have a template message that we can use as a basis to explain why we're removing the milestone.

Automated tasks

Make sure dependencies are installed:

sudo apt install -y python3-django python3-gitlab podman

To run the automated triaging processes described below, execute the following commands:

./config/gitlab-triage/bin/ensure-up-to-date-container-image && \
./bin/gitlab-triage-gardener \
    --host-url "$(bin/gitlab-url TailsGardener)" \
    --token "$(bin/gitlab-api-token TailsGardener)"

This can take a few dozens of minutes to complete. You can pass any extra gitlab-triage option, such as --dry-run.

Implementation:

Stalled WIP

  • Scope = issues assigned to somebody, labeled Doing, and not updated for a while

  • Output = a summary issue, which:

    • mentions each GitLab user who has such issues assigned to them; this adds an item to the To-Do list of these users

    • lists these issues, grouped by assignee

Stalled validation

  • Scope = issues assigned to somebody, labeled Needs Validation, and not updated for a while

  • Output = a summary issue, which:

    • mentions each GitLab user who has such issues assigned to them; this adds an item to the To-Do list of these users
    • lists these issues, grouped by assignee

Stalled merge requests

  • Scope = merge requests assigned to somebody not updated for a while

  • Output = a summary issue, which:

    • mentions each GitLab user who has such MRs assigned to them; this adds an item to the To-Do list of these users
    • lists these MRs, grouped by assignee