Brainstorming: What's the current issue status?

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webchick's picture

Hope this isn't being presumptuous to start throwing around some designs, but I was thinking about this some on the plane ride home...

One of the things that's really challenging about our collaboration tools is understanding what the current status is of an issue. Another thing raised at the talk was that it's very difficult for a passer-by to understand how they might be able to help. And a third pain point is lack of easy, contextual documentation about how to actually do things like write docs, create patches, etc.

So, just as a place to start talking, here's an awful mockup of what a block trying to fix all three of these problems might look like. ;)


Issue status block that shows various 'gates' and their completion status


We would make the "gates" identified by Dries more explicit (and also potentially add some, like coding standards or whatever) and show really obviously what was left to do on a patch vs. what is irrelevant (a patch that doesn't change the user interface in any way doesn't really need UX team sign-off, though we might want DX (Developer eXperience) sign-off). Then there are the usual "Jump to" links at the bottom, with one addition of "Issue summary" (which I am completely punting on since that's a separate issue ;)).

I like this general approach much better than tabs, because it would scale out to N possible gates without making baby Jesus cry.

However, there are some obvious problems with this:

  1. Not every project cares about all these gates. The gates probably would need to be configurable on a per-project basis.
  2. If we do that, the fact that this list potentially changes all the time would probably be confusing for people navigating around between core and Views and Documentation, though.
  3. It's total link overload, and it's not at all obvious where those links are going to take you.
  4. It's not clear what sort of instructions we could give for some of these, like "UX check". Currently that consists of "Does it make Bojhan and yoroy cry?" Likely, we'd need to formalize our UX patterns guidelines and link to that instead.

...and likely others as well.

Thoughts?

AttachmentSize
issue-status-block.png230.98 KB

Comments

Hope it's ok i shrunk the

arianek's picture

Hope it's ok i shrunk the width of the image about 30px (it wasn't fitting on my 13" screen so I figure lots of people were also not able to see it without opening the attachment0.

I really like the idea of the overview block with the checkmarks, x's, etc. and think a designer could do a lot to make that pretty and easy to scan for important info.

  1. agreed
  2. not sure i understand - but realizing this could get messy when moving issues into other queues?
  3. hm. yah maybe. but it's a starting point.
  4. totally. in writing the "gates" section of my post http://affinitybridge.com/blog/drupal-8-git-sprints-efficient-smooth on process changes we could experiment with, i realized what a long way we have to go to a) establish which gates exist b) build teams c) decide on standards d) decide on a workflow and who's responsible for what.

there's a long way to go with this stuff yet, but this is the perfect time to deal with this sort of work!

While we are on the issue

mikey_p's picture

While we are on the issue queue, I'd love to add how to display commits that mention this issue. We're very close to being able to do this on d.o, and there has been some debate over whether or not a commit should be noted as a comment followup, or in some other manner (a sidebar block?). We should also probably focus on how to fit the related issues section in as well, if we are going for a total overhaul of the issue queue all at once.

Mikey_p, I think it would be

yoroy's picture

Mikey_p, I think it would be useful if you could summarize what you've been working on and what it will change in how issues work. I think you have a screencast somewhere? Screenshot maybe? Thanks!

Sure, the two main items that

mikey_p's picture

Sure, the two main items that I've been working on (aside from bugs like, issue cross posting) are:

related issue, which is in progress at http://drupal.org/project/pi_related

showing associated commits, which is in progress at http://drupal.org/node/493074

I have a number of other issues I'm working on related to the commit listings at http://drupal.org/commitlog. We now have much more data for each commit such as the list of files, # of lines added/removed, whether the file is new, deleted, moved, updated, renamed, etc, but we had to disable it on the primary views for performance reasons.

D7 Version?

mgifford's picture

@mikey_p - no plans for a d7 version of https://drupal.org/project/pi_related

Finding related issues, particularly in active issue queues, could be very important.

I also love how Unfuddle does

arianek's picture

I also love how Unfuddle does this... this is below the referenced tickets list on a given issue eg.:

Only local images are allowed.

There is already an issue for

marvil07's picture

There is already an issue for it in the versioncontrol_project module ;-)

Back-link to the commit at the issue node.

thanks for the good ideas

marvil07's picture

Using a block with a colour behind would help a lot visually IMHO(It always take me some time to find it in text). And implementing a list of checks per project issue queue sounds like something doable(same as the list of issue categories + a state per item?)

oh, of course webchick

YesCT's picture

oh, of course webchick already thought of this... :)
there was some actual work on https://drupal.org/node/2013222 (Add "issue tasks" metadata to core issues and integrate with handbook documentation) to implement this now that the initial d.o d7 upgrade is done.

Cathy Theys

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