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Amend the tech debt in follow-ups policy

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Nick Thomas 2018-10-17 17:29:25 +01:00
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doc/development/contributing/issue_workflow.md
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@ -319,23 +319,39 @@ Make sure to mention the merge request that the ~"technical debt" issue or
It's common to discover technical debt during development of a new feature. In
the spirit of "minimum viable change", resolution is often deferred to a
follow-up issue. However, this has limited value unless a commitment to address
the debt is made. As technical debt reduces development velocity, it's important
to keep it under control.
follow-up issue. However, this cannot be used as an excuse to merge poor-quality
code that would otherwise not pass review, or to overlook trivial matters that
don't deserve the be scheduled independently, and would be best resolved in the
original merge request - or not tracked at all!
Before accepting resolution of technical debt in a follow-up issue, maintainers
should check that that fix is not trivial, and that the contributor (or their
team) can commit to scheduling the issue within the next 3 releases.
The overheads of scheduling, and rate of change in the GitLab codebase, mean
that the cost of a trivial technical debt issue can quickly exceed the value of
tracking it. This generally means we should resolve these in the original merge
request - or simply not create a follow-up issue at all.
Trivial fixes can - and should - be addressed within the same MR.
For example, a typo in a comment that is being copied between files is worth
fixing in the same MR, but not worth creating a follow-up issue for. Renaming a
method that is used in many places to make its intent slightly clearer may be
worth fixing, but it should not happen in the same MR, and is generally not
worth the overhead of having an issue of its own. These issues would invariably
be labelled `~P4 ~S4` if we were to create them.
If a commitment to address the issue in the foreseeable future cannot be found,
the maintainer must make a value judgement on whether the problem deserves an
issue at all. If the commitment is lacking because the issue is neither trivial
nor valuable, then perhaps no issue needs to be made after all. If a commitment
is lacking because technical debt is being unfairly neglected, then maintainers
should generally insist on resolution of the issue upfront, to protect
development velocity.
More severe technical debt can have implications for development velocity. If
it isn't addressed in a timely manner, the codebase becomes needlessly difficult
to change, new features become difficult to add, and regressions abound.
Discoveries of this kind of technical debt should be treated seriously, and
while resolution in a follow-up issue may be appropriate, maintainers should
generally obtain a scheduling commitment from the author of the original MR, or
the engineering or product manager for the relevant area. This may take the form
of appropriate Priority / Severity labels on the issue, or an explicit milestone
and assignee.
The maintainer must always agree before an outstanding discussion is resolved in
this manner, and will be the one to create the issue. The title and description
should be of the same quality as those created
[in the usual manner](#technical-and-ux-debt) - in particular, the issue title
**must not** begin with "Follow-up ...".
## Stewardship