Issue Tracking

This page describes how we track issues in the vscode repository.

Inbox tracking and Issue triage

New issues or pull requests submitted by the community are triaged by a team member. The team rotates the inbox tracker on a weekly basis.

Inbox Tracking

The inbox are all the open issues or pull requests that have no milestone assigned:

Inbox Query

The inbox tracker analyses the bug and performs the following steps:

• If the issue or pull request is valid, it is assigned to the Backlog milestone. This indicates that the issue has been triaged.
• If an issue is a general question like 'How to compile TypeScript', then the author is redirected to stack overflow.

Please ask 'how-to' questions about VS Code on [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vscode) using
the tag `vscode`. 
The VS Code development team together with the VS Code Community will answer question your question over there. 
Here is how the development team tracks feedback on the different channels: [Feedback Channels](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/Feedback-Channels).

• If an issue needs more info the needs more info label is assigned and the author is asked for more information in a comment. The issue is assigned to the Backlog and a team member to track it.
• If the issue is a bug, add the bug label and assign it to a person
• If the issue is a feature request, add the label feature request and @mention if someone from the team should be aware of the feature request
• If needed edit the title to improve it
• Assign the issue with a feature/topic area label
• Assign a important label if the issue is important and optionally mention @microsoft/vscode to get the attention of the entire team.

The person assigned to do the inbox tracking does not have to (unless they want to):

• Perform a duplicate search
• Engage into a discussion with the author of the issue and ask for more information

2nd level Triage, done by the assignee

• Review the feature-request vs. bug assignment, if it is a feature request remove the assignee, add the correct label
• Assign the important label if needed
• Assign the current milestone if the issue needs to be fixed in this release (blocks a scenario, completes a new feature, etc.)
• Follow-up with the author as needed

Fix planning

At the beginning of the endgame we review the open issues and adjust the milestone if needed, moving to the next milestone or back to the backlog.

At the beginning of the debt week we review the issues, pull requests assigned to the backlog milestone, and assign the ones we want to address to the current milestone.

Filing bugs as development team member

When team members files a bug they perform steps of the inbox tracker for the issue they filed. Therefore bugs filed by the development team do not need to be triged by the inbox tracker.

Bug Verification

Bugs need to be verified.

• Once a bug is fixed its state is changed to closed
• If it needs verification, assign it to another team member
• Once verified, label the issue with verified

Tip: To see what bugs you need to verify, create a personal query: current milestone, assigned to me, closed, -label:"verified"

Duplicates

Duplicate bugs are closed with a comment duplicates #issue. Please try to reference an earlier issue unless a later issue is more appropriate (has more context, better scenarios, repro steps, etc.).

Moving issues to another repository

Use the issue mover tool to move bugs to another repository.

Consistent labels across vscode repositories

Visual Studio Code consists of multiple repositories and we should use consistent work flows and labels across all our repositories.

To establish consistent labels across all our repositories use the Label Manager tool.

Consistent milestones across vscode repositories

To enable planning across repositories all the Visual Studio Code related repositories need to define the same milestones.

Iteration Planning

We use issues for iteration plans and test plans:

• Iteration Plans have a label iteration-plan with tasks [ ] for the different items. The individual items are tracked in existing issues (bugs, feature requests). If there is no existing issue then a new issue with the label plan-item is created. Here is an example.
• Test Plans have a label test-plan, here is an example.