Automation Idea Proposal: Automated GitHub Issue Comments

[Aveline-art]

Your Name

@Aveline-art

Your Email

Overview: describe the kind of repetitive thing you have to do and the benefit of automating it?

GitHub Board maintenance. Specifically, we need to detect inactivity in issues and perform some action in response to that, such as an automated message.

Ownership of Idea

Anyone can potentially work on this.

Current State: Is this just an idea, or has any work already been done to build it?

Most of it has been completed. I only need to port it from a GitHub Action into a GitHub module.

Languages or frameworks used?

yml
js
potentially more

Platform?

Web/GitHub

Automation triggers: What starts it? What's it responding to? Time or event based?

Multiple triggers are possible. It can be on issue open, on comment, on label, or even during a set time.

How much manual or custom input is required?

None. There only needs to be an initial configuration.

Output: What's the desired result? What do we not want to see?

The desired result is to put the onus of GitHub board maintenance on the individual rather than team leadership, as maintaining the organization of a board is abysmal work. A disorganized board is a velocity drain on a project.

Project size: rough estimate of effort and time needed to build it

Should be about a month, at most, depending on availability.

Stakeholders and Impact - who benefits and how?

This should benefit all teams at HackForLA.

Resources/Instructions: Has any documentation been created yet?

Several resources to get started:

Events that trigger workflows
Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions
actions/github-script
GitHub RESTAPI
GitHub GraphQL

Action Items/Research Needed

• Research how to create a GitHub module
• Create the module in such a way that it will:
  • On a specified trigger:
  • Perform some analysis on an issue
  • And comment a message based on the result of the analysis.

[ExperimentsInHonesty]

Hi @Aveline-art this is a great idea for an automation. Can you clarify one item for us:

You said

Stakeholders and Impact - who benefits and how?
This should benefit all teams at HackForLA.

Would this be useful to anyone who uses GitHub project boards and issues to manage their project?

[Aveline-art]

Thanks for the great question! @ExperimentsInHonesty

That would depend on how general vs specialized we want it to work. If it is more general, there needs to be more customization on the client to use properly, vs specialized such that it works out of the box for one very specific purpose.