Changing the way we work on GitHub

Being a distributed team, GitHub is our single most important piece of the puzzle that makes up Nancy. With the recent changes in our governance, we felt we needed to make some changes on how we work on GitHub.

Cleaning up issues and pull-requests

We have a fair amount of open issues and pull-requests. These consist of a mix of ideas that people have, feature requests, feature implementations and other changes.

Some of these are dated as far back as 12 months or more. This does not mean they are not important to us, or that we have forgotten about them. We have simply kept a couple of them around because we like the ideas, but they have not been a priority for us. Also they usually act as a nice summary of the original authors thoughts on the subject.

However, we have decided that we're doing to go through all of them and handle them each in the most appropriate way. Simply put, all current issues with either be merged, resolved (which may involve coding) or closed. We hope to get a clean, or almost clean, slate.

Better use of milestones

We have always used milestones and assigned issues to them. Usually this have meant that things that came in and that we thought we would like to get out soon, we assigned to the next release.

This often led to more issues on a milestone than we could handle, leaving us to eventually push our a new version with what was done, and move the remaining open issues to the next milestone instead.

From now own we are only going to assigned issues and pull-requests to a milestone when they are resolved. This means that we will review and pull stuff in and then we will assign them to an issue. We are going to keep the number of open-issues, that are assigned to a milestone, down to a minimum.

Cleaning up our labels

We used to have about 10 labels. While these were created over the years with the best of intentions, many of them were no longer being used and a couple of them also overlapped a bit.

So what we did was remove all but four. The ones that we are keeping are Breaking change, Up for grabs, Bug and Update Documentation.

Hopefully this will make it easier for us to maintain. We might add others if they provide any value, but for now we will be moving forward with these four.

"This post was aggregated from http://thecodejunkie.com/2014/06/19/changing-the-way-we-work-on-github/ and all comments should be submitted on the original post"