We’re making some important changes to how we manage our GitHub issues in the WooCommerce monorepo.
Consolidating 106 different focus labels to ~20
With more than 106 focus labels currently in our repository, we’ve created unnecessary overhead when triaging issues. This makes it harder for our teams to efficiently manage incoming reports and for our community to understand where to direct their feedback.
By streamlining these labels, we’re aiming to reduce cognitive load during issue triage, improve efficiency across our monorepo, and create clearer product area designations. This will make it easier to understand which areas are receiving the most bug reports and help us prioritize where we’re spending our development time.
Starting April 23rd, we’ll begin consolidating our focus labels into a more focused set of product areas.
Here’s what this means in practice: We’ll begin consolidating over 106 focus labels into approximately 20 product area labels. A new triage flow for WooCommerce Core will begin on April 28th. Our team will review our open issues in the repository, and each product area will have specific assignments for triage.
For example, labels like “focus: blocks”, “focus: patterns”, and “focus: template” will be consolidated into a single “Site Editor” label. Similarly, “focus: cart” will simply become “Cart”, etc.
Changes to priority labels for more accurate progress tracking
As part of this consolidation, we’re also removing the priority labels from GitHub issues. Moving forward, we’ll be using internal tools for prioritization that won’t be visible on GitHub.
We understand this might raise questions about how to determine when we’ll work on specific issues. To provide clarity:
- Issue assignment: Our new triage flow will involve assigning team members to issues we plan to work on, especially bugs. Assigned issues are ones we’ve committed to addressing.
- Active issue closure: We’ll be actively closing issues we know we won’t be working on. If an issue remains open, it means we consider it valid and worth addressing in the future.
These signals will provide a clearer indication of our development priorities than the previous priority labels system.
What this means for contributors
We’ll be systematically reviewing and closing issues that we know we won’t be addressing, especially internally-created issues.
We encourage our community to continue submitting issues as normal, and our new triage process will handle applying the appropriate labels and team assignments.
We’re cleaning up our backlog of 3.3k issues
As part of this change, we’re asking all our teams to spend time each week going through existing issues. They’ll close issues we won’t get to and fix low-hanging fruit they come across. They’ll also surface potential high-value improvements for prioritization and flag issues they’re unsure how to handle for review.
Our goal is to reach a point where the remaining open issues are ones we know need prioritization on our roadmaps because of the high value they bring to the product.
This is just the first step in our workflow improvements
This consolidation is just one part of our broader efforts to improve our development workflows. We’ll be closely monitoring how these changes affect our issue management process and will make adjustments as needed.
We believe these changes will help us better serve the WooCommerce community by allowing us to focus our development efforts where they matter most.
If you have any questions or feedback about these changes, please let us know in the comments below.
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