Formalizing/documenting triage process

[danmoseley]

Hypothesis

Lack of formalized triaged process/workflow and a lack of automation causes issues to go stale and owners have to follow up manually; prioritization is obscured.

Experiment

In dotnet/runtime, writing out our triage process in a transparent way, and trial automation through fabric bot for certain actions, for example:

• needs more info issues get automatically closed if nothing has happened after 14 days -- or label removed if there was a reply.
• duplicate issues get closed automatically if no activity has occurred after 2 days.
• Issues marked question or customer assistance are closed automatically if no activity has occurred after 2 days.
• Closed issues get locked after 30 days of no activity.

We will carry out these experiments in a localized manner, only taking effect in certain areas owned by resposiveness WG members. When performing an automated action, fabric bot will post a message notifying users of the experiment and linking to relevant documentation that justify the action taken.

Success criteria

We will be measuring any impact that the experiment has had on responsiveness metrics such as "time to triage" and "time to resolution".

Roslyn have found this made it easier to enable community triagers: #18

[danmoseley]

Team is currently collaborating on documentation for dotnet/runtime triage process.

[eiriktsarpalis]

We are working on a draft document that establishes common issue triage workflows for dotnet/runtime in #17.

TODO follow up with another document detailing all active automation policies following the style of the aspnetcore repo.

[danmoseley]

@eiriktsarpalis could you please include links here to other documents that are potentially effective in repos that you've looked at.

@RyanCavanaugh noted that there is documentation in the Typescript repo, but folks aren't necessarily finding it (since questions are commonly asked).

@brettcannon noted in the Python repo there is an onboarding doc, but it's not clear it's widely read. In contrast, VS Code is thoroughly documented.

[eiriktsarpalis]

Here are some of the documents I've been looking at:

• VSCode Issue Triaging Workflow
• VSCode CONTRIBUTING.md
• aspnetcore Triage Process
• aspnetcore Issue Management Policies

[danmoseley]

Expect to get this committed shortly to support #18