Distribution Team Triage

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Engineering Team Triage

Triaging Issues

Terminologies

Triaging: Triaging issues involves investigating and applying labels and milestones to issues.
Partially Triaged issues: Issues are considered partially triaged if they have been assigned for scheduling or awaiting feedback labels.
Fully Triaged issues: Issues are fully triaged when they have been assigned a Milestone, even if it is Backlog. They should have appropriate group, priority and product category labels applied.

Note: An issue that has been assigned to a user, but has no milestone, is not triaged, but is considered the responsibility of that user, and is not part of our triage queue at this time.

Issue severity

See the CE documentation for an explanation of the severity labels.

Label glossary

Label	What it means	How to handle it
awaiting feedback	Information has been requested from the user	If no reply has been received in two weeks, the issue can be closed.
maintainer-discussion	Issues for further discussion by project Maintainers	Projects maintainers should review status and provide input within 2 weeks.
needs investigation	Information has been provided by the user, but is waiting on the team to further dive in	The team member who added the label should try to find some time to investigate or engage other team members within 4 weeks.

During triage, an appropriate group:: label should be applied to the issue.

group::distribution::build for Distribution Build team responsibilities
group::distribution::deploy for Distribution Deploy team responsibilities
group::distribution for Distribution team shared responsibilities
The otherwise appropriate group to assign based on GitLab Features by Group

During triage additional labels should be added to indicate what part of the product is impacted by the issue. Descriptions for the labels that Distribution often uses can be found the Distribution Frequently Used Labels Page.

Resources

Issues for triaging can be identified using the following criteria:

They have no milestone
They have no assignee
They do not have any of the following labels applied:
- awaiting feedback
- for scheduling
- maintainer-discussion
- needs investigation

Such issues can be listed using the issues filter

Process

Distribution team implements issue triaging on a rotating schedule, where each person in the team gets assigned to do it for one week. This is done in the order of joining the company. The process which one follows while on issue triage duty can be summarized as follows

The previous team member on triage duty should have created and assigned the weekly meta issue to you at the end of their week. The issue title should be Issue triage rotation week of <starting date>
We follow the policy of closing an issue if it has been 14 days since awaiting feedback label was added and no response was received from submitter. Check out the issue list with awaiting feedback label for such issues and close them with the "for issues with no reply" response.
Check out the issues to be triaged and assign appropriate labels to them. While it is normal for some issues to demand a bit of research to get to the bottom, do keep in mind issue triaging need not end up in issue resolution. Triaging is intended only to identify and classify issues so that appropriate action can be taken on them, based on priority.
If an issue doesn't fall directly under the domain of the project it is logged in (for example, needs changes to gitlab-rails application, but was made in the omnibus-gitlab project), move the issue to the appropriate issue tracker and add the team label which may be the most appropriate. If you can't identify which project's tracker should the issue reside or which team's label should be applied, you can ask for Quality team's help for doing it by mentioning @gitlab-org/issue-triage in the comments.
If an issue doesn't deal with the code base or work flow of the project but is more of a request for help for installing/configuring/troubleshooting a GitLab instance, close the issue using the "problems not related to package installation and configuration" response.
If an issue doesn't have all necessary information to successfully triage the issue, request the information using the "issues that lack enough information" response and add the awaiting feedback label.
If an issue couldn't be triaged in reasonable time, add the needs investigation label to it.
Issues occasionally would be best inspected by a project maintainer. When this occurs, label them with maintainer-discussion. Example cases where maintainers should be notified with this label:
1. An issue was accurate at the time of creation, but is questionable at this time.
2. An issue was not accurate or in line with our vision at the time, but may be now.
3. The viability of the issue is of interest, but may not be reasonable as proposed.
If an issue is identified as a valid one, make it partially triaged by assigning For Scheduling label so that it gets scheduled for one of the upcoming milestones (or even Backlog milestone). Also apply the severity labels as applicable.
If an issue is a valid issue, and there is a valid workaround. Close the issue with details on the workaround, and open a follow up issue to fix the bug. Ensure the issue includes:
1. Details on how to recreate the bug
2. How to workaround the issue
3. What the expected behavior is
4. The user issue as a related issue
5. The appropriate priority and severity
Once an issue is triaged, either partially or fully, add the link to that issue as a comment to the meta issue. Preferably in the format of <action> <url> where <action> can be moved, closed, triaged, resolved or marked as needs investigation. This helps in keeping track of the issue triaged per week. Related issues feature of GitLab should not be used for this purpose as it generates an incorrect association between the issues.
Use the /spend quick action feature of GitLab to track the time you spent in triaging issues. There are no hard limits for this, but a reasonable amount of time would be 3 to 5 hours a week.
Since issues piling up is almost inevitable in any software project, we should try to bring down the issue count as much as possible. This mainly involves tackling existing backlog of untriaged issues.
During the next weekly meeting, inform the team about the triage week - link to the meta issue, number of issues triaged and time spent. And discuss if you think something should be changed regarding the process. Also, create a similar header for the next presenter as an agenda item for the next week's meeting in the meeting doc.
Close the meta issue.
Create a new meta issue for the next team member on triage duty, and assign them to it. The issue title should be Issue triage rotation week of <starting date>. Use the Triage template to fill in the description.

Response templates

Copy and paste into issues where appropriate

If someone is asking for support in our projects, point them to the correct place to look

We are sorry you are having troubles. The provided issue description seems to indicate that the problem is not related to this project. Commonly this indicates other troubles such as network connectivity or filesystem permissions.

For this reason, I will close this issue and recommend checking out [how to get further help](https://about.gitlab.com/get-help/) on the GitLab website.

/close

If someone is asking for help with a bug that seems related to GitLab code other than Omnibus

We are sorry you are having troubles. The provided issue description seems to indicate that the problem is not related to Omnibus.

For this reason, we are moving this report to a more appropriate issue queue.  Please review the bug templates for the new project in case they require additional information to help diagnose the problem.

We also recommend checking out [how to get further help](https://about.gitlab.com/get-help/) on the GitLab website.

For issues that lack enough information

If someone opened a ticket without enough information, make sure they use the Bug template, and fill it in

We can't reproduce the issue with the information you provided here.

Can you please use our `Bug` template to help gather more details?

1. Click on the pencil icon near the issue title to edit the description
1. From the **Choose a template** drop down, select the **Bug** template
1. Read the template, and provide as much information as you can that we ask for
1. Click on the **Save changes** button to apply your changes.
1. Add a comment mentioning you updated the description.

/label ~"awaiting feedback"

For issues with no reply

If an issue has been labeled awaiting feedback for two weeks, and we haven't received a response, it can be closed

We haven't heard back from you, so we're going to go ahead and close the issue.

If you're still experiencing the problem, please re-open the issue and provide the requested information.

/close

For issues closed with no reply with new comments from a different reporter

If an issue was closed for no reply and someone comments who is not the original reporter, we ask them to open a new issue. Be sure to tag the contributor who made the comment.

Thank you for letting us know about your issue COMMENTOR. Unfortunately, this issue was already closed. Please [open a new issue](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/new?issue) following the ***BUG*** template and mark this closed issue as related.

For issues where a maintainer should review the current viability

If an issue appears to need review directly by a project maintainer to ascertain relevance,

I'm going to ask that this issue be reviewed by the project maintainers directly.
This is so that we can make the most accurate decision regarding further work and viability.
/label ~maintainer-discussion

Onboarding to Triage

We start looking to onboard new Distribution team members to Triage duty after 3 months. This can be sooner if a team member feels they are familiar enough with the team processes to start working on triage.

To onboard to triage, a team member will shadow an experienced triage team member for a week. Expectations are:

The mentor and shadow were made aware and agreed to mentoring prior to the triage week.
The shadow reads the triage process document in advance.
The mentor and shadow have a synchronous call earlier in the triage week for the mentor to go over how they approach triage.
The shadow attempts to triage a few issues asynchronously during the week.
A followup sync call is scheduled for later in the week for mentor and shadow to try triaging some issues together.

A shadow may need multiple weeks on shadow before they feel comfortable on a solo triage week.

Triaging Pipelines

Pipeline failures are a shared team responsibility and need to be handled as soon as possible by whomever is available. That said, the team member on triage duty has a responsibility to follow up on any failures which occurred and provide a summarized tally in the Triage notes.

Note that we are in the process of automating issue creation for every time a critical pipeline fails. Some pipelines failures are notified in our #g_distribution Slack channel, but do not yet have issues automatically created for it. See this epic to track ongoing work.

Recommended workflow for pipeline failure triage

Optionally, share on the Slack message any initial thoughts, or leave a comment indicating your action plan.
Check if an issue was automatically created for it. If not, please create one.
Link the issue in the inital Slack message so that everybody contributing to solve the problem can use the issue as a single source of truth.
Once you started investigating the issue, add the pipeline failure::under investigation label to it.
If you managed to fix the problem, close the issue.
If you managed to mitigate the problem and make the pipeline pass, but the issue could comeback in the future, then:
- Write a comment explaining which actions did you take to mitigate it.
- Check if there's an existing follow-up issue to investigate/implement a definitive fix for the problem, and link it to this pipeline issue failure. If the such a follow-up issue does not yet exist, create one and link it.
Failures requiring follow up issue(s) to fix pipelines that are still in a broken state should also be noted to increase team awareness. Those issues should be labeled with Broken Pipeline.
Failures caused by upstream failure should be labeled with Upstream bug and linked with the related upstream issue.
Before closing the issue, don't forget to set the milestone and double check that you have added pipeline failure::under investigation. This is important for metric purposes.

Details on the various pipelines and jobs implemented by different projects under Distribution are listed below:

omnibus-gitlab