(WIP) Triage of issues

This guide is intended to help assess priority when reviewing open issues for browser-laptop.

Getting started

Issues which are needing triage are assigned to the Triage Backlog milestone: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/milestone/48

These issues are needing to be looked at. At Brave Software, we have a weekly 1 hour meeting on Tuesdays at 10am PST with the purpose of going through the issues.

Assessing Priority

We should be triaging issued based on a set of criteria which involves the user. Let's continue to refine and expand this list to make triaging any issue easy.

• P1 - Blocks development or testing. Product cannot run.
  • Issues labelled P1 need to be fixed immediately
  • These would be shipped in the next release
• P2 - Crashes. Loss of data. Severe memory leak.
• P3 - Major loss of function.
• P4 - Minor loss of function. Workaround usually present.
• P5 - Cosmetic. Spelling, copy, layout.
  • if issue is requesting a new feature, it likely falls here
  • for new features, let's try to match up to an initiative

Once an issue is assigned a priority, please move it to the prioritized backlog: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/milestone/88

Tying issues to initiatives

Feature requests can be difficult to judge based on the above criteria. For these, we want to tie them to a Brave Software initiative. For example, issues with website compatibility would be a great candidate for initiative/web-compat. Please label the issue with these

Assigning milestone

Assigning a milestone should typically be avoided. The triage process should focus on:

• establishing a priority
• assigning an initiative label(s)
• moving issue to prioritized backlog

There are times where the issue is required for a release and it also blocks the release. If folks agree this should be looked at, we can choose to assign to a given release milestone and add the release blocking label.

How to add/remove labels

DO

• Add bug to any bug (this will make it easy to find issues which should be fixed actually)
• Add Info-needed to issues which additional information should be provided
• Remove Info-needed from issues which additional information was provided
• Add Duplicate to duping issues
• Add QA\no qa needed to issues and PRs which do not require QA tests
• Add labels under feature to major features (eg. feature/autofill)
• Add labels under misc to minor or general features (eg. misc/favicon)
• Add labels under OS to issues which are specific to each platform (eg. OS/Windows)

DO NOT

• Remove the other labels, if any, from issues labelled with Duplicate
• Add labels under OS to multi-platform issues