Proposal to Auto Close Inactive Tickets

[Addison Huddy <ad...@confluent.io>]

Hi Kafka Developers,

The Apache Kafka JIRA currently has 2138 open JIRA tickets. As Charlie
Munger <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger> once said,
“Simplicity has a way of improving performance through enabling us to
better understand what we are doing.”

What are everyone’s thoughts on adopting what the k8s community is doing
and auto close any ticket that has not seen any updates for 90 days.

https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contributors/devel/automation.md

Prow will close pull-requests that don't have human activity in the
last 90 days. It will warn about this process 60 days before closing
the pull-request, and warn again 30 days later. One way to prevent
this from happening is to add the lifecycle/frozen label on the
pull-request.

If we were to adopt this practice, we could reduce our open ticket count to
553, a 74% decrease.
project = KAFKA AND resolution = Unresolved AND updated >= "-90d" ORDER BY
created DESC

So how might this work?

   - a bot, let’s call it Bender, would ping the ticket reporter after 30
   days of inactivity
   - After 60 days, Bender would again ping the reporter warning them that
   the ticket will be closed due to inactivity
   - After 90 days of inactivity, bender would resolve the ticket with the
   status Auto Closed and a comment that the ticket was resolved due to
   inactivity.
   - Bender would ignore all tickets with the label bender-ignore


[image: image.png]

Let me know what you think?

\ah

Re: Proposal to Auto Close Inactive Tickets

[Sönke Liebau <so...@opencore.com.INVALID>]

Hi Addison,

in general, I am totally in favor of closing unnecessary tickets! However,
over the past few weeks, I have spent quite a bit of time looking at old
tickets and evaluating whether those should be closed or are still
relevant. For a surprising number of these tickets, I've found that there
might actually still be something useful to do (the majority was easily
closeable though).

I totally agree that a cleanup makes sense, but I am a bit hesitant about
doing it automatically, even if no one feels responsible for the ticket
anymore, there may still be merit to it.

So personally I'd prefer a concerted cleanup effort to an automated
solution - but that is just my opinion :)

We have just discussed the jira workflow in the Apache Training project as
well and agreed on a workflow that has an initial "triage" state instead of
moving tickets directly to "open" - which should serve as an initial check
if the ticket is "valid" or something better suited to the mailing list,
not an issue, ...
Something similar might be an option to help keeping jira "clean" after an
initial cleanup effort.

Best regards,
Sönke

Am Do., 11. Apr. 2019, 20:55 hat Addison Huddy <ad...@confluent.io>
geschrieben:

> Hi Kafka Developers,
>
> The Apache Kafka JIRA currently has 2138 open JIRA tickets. As Charlie
> Munger <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger> once said,
> “Simplicity has a way of improving performance through enabling us to
> better understand what we are doing.”
>
> What are everyone’s thoughts on adopting what the k8s community is doing
> and auto close any ticket that has not seen any updates for 90 days.
>
>
> https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contributors/devel/automation.md
>
> Prow will close pull-requests that don't have human activity in the last 90 days. It will warn about this process 60 days before closing the pull-request, and warn again 30 days later. One way to prevent this from happening is to add the lifecycle/frozen label on the pull-request.
>
> If we were to adopt this practice, we could reduce our open ticket count
> to 553, a 74% decrease.
> project = KAFKA AND resolution = Unresolved AND updated >= "-90d" ORDER BY
> created DESC
>
> So how might this work?
>
>    - a bot, let’s call it Bender, would ping the ticket reporter after 30
>    days of inactivity
>    - After 60 days, Bender would again ping the reporter warning them
>    that the ticket will be closed due to inactivity
>    - After 90 days of inactivity, bender would resolve the ticket with
>    the status Auto Closed and a comment that the ticket was resolved due to
>    inactivity.
>    - Bender would ignore all tickets with the label bender-ignore
>
>
> [image: image.png]
>
> Let me know what you think?
>
> \ah
>
>