Triaging issues

This page is written for people helping triaging issues on the issue Github tracker.

Preamble

• Any project has limited resources, the difference between projects will be the threshold.
• Any project should have clear goals. For Ansel, it is to manage, edit and export collections of RAW images.
• Any project has overhead, that is actions requested to meet the goals, although they are not directly the goal and therefore should stay minimal. For Ansel, it is the maintenance of the website, documentation, servers, nightly-built packages, code cleanups, regression tests, cross-OS support, issues triaging, etc.
• Goals and overhead should be expressed in terms of tasks to perform in order to solve problems (issues),
• because of resource limitation, tasks have to be ordered depending on their priority.

The following document aims at defining this priority.

Defining good issues

I love the SMART approach. Each task should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionnable/Achievable,
• Realistic
• Time-bound.

A good issue is one that leads to a SMART task. For Ansel, that means issues focusing on a clearly-defined problem affecting a clearly-defined step of the picture editing workflow ("I have problems doing X because Y and I would like Z").

Questions and general discussions should happen on https://community.ansel.photos.

Issues asking to introduce some specific tech (typically, neural networks…) to extend features are typically bad, because they focus on the mean and not on the end, and their authors typically want to push that cool new tech they just heard about, regardless whether it solves an actual problem, let alone if it's realistic (for users and for devs) in the context of Ansel.