Please spend 20 minutes tidying up your PRs/issues/tickets/whatever.
If something is irrelevant, close or delete it.
If it something is old but might still be relevant, see if you can move it toward completion (or deletion). Try this: “This issue is quite old. I’m going to delete this early next week unless someone objects. That okay with you @whoever?”
If something is new and relevant, but not actionable, see if you can add or track down the information required to make it actionable.
I recommend working from oldest to newest.
As always, remember that the point isn’t to clean up all the things, it’s to spend 20 minutes chipping away at them.
I managed to delete/archive a few obsolete issues, and is now talking to our product designer about because he has 90% of the tasks in JIRA that are older than 6 months and unresolved.
I personally feel weighted down by a long backlog, and I want to let him know that it is OK to relieve himself of this burden, because most of the issues aren’t really something we want to do anymore.
I have been looking at our growing issue list and when I saw this task I thought the ones in the end are probably really old! But the oldest was from September, so quite good atleast.
Found a lot of issues which I had created and already resolved which I could close, then I tried to start a discussion about some of them with my colleagues
Only got through 2 of 8 pages, but ~10 issues closed.
We were preparing a large changeset at the end of the last year, but during test on staging we found several no-go issues. So we reverted that changeset and immediately opened pull request to restore it back. Spent some time today resolving conflict with current state of master branch so that when we return back to these features it would be easier to catch up with the actual changes.
I have spent significant part of this day completing static site generation project, communicating with end user (medical doctor) using issue tracker. It went very well, all things are resolved and all is simply recorded in issues for later references.
Then I went to fulfil today CQC task and took very old issues.
Two were simply obsolete (relevant project is over).
Two were issues, which I have to wait for my colleague to comment.
I gave my colleague a week to react. I wonder, what reaction will be. These “about to close unless some reaction” messages can upset some people (my colleague is very good at being quick and upset, then quick to come back, apologize if necessary and do something about it).
yay, another great task. Took the time and closed stale/outdated issues in ApprovalTests.Java (which was initially one of the reasons why I started contributing, the project looked abondened)
I had fun closing out PRs today. I generally like removing things more than adding things.
Similar to the branch challenge previously, I start with my yard, so to speak, and then carefully move to others. With the PRs, some were obvious for me to close because I remember them and I know we solved the problem in another way. Others, I just ask the author if it’s still relevant or if they want to close it. For the ones that I commented on but weren’t closed by the author, I can close them next month. The branch will still be there and they can reopen if they wish.
The list of PRs should be relevant to the prioritized work of the company. This includes proof of concepts that have a discussion thread. If no one is working on it or discussing it, it should be closed.
Working from oldest to newest made the 20 minutes go by quickly. I didn’t even have to touch any PRs from the past month.
Next month I look forward to tackling the issues in our issue tracker.
Mostly all clean, spent some time doing general maintenance on package versions which is not a ticket but is budgeted for and not regularly practiced sometimes.
