Managing Lens Issues

It’s great to see so much traction around Lens. As the number of users goes up, so does the number of issues and feedback. We are looking at the issues and feedback as a guideline to adjust the direction of the project. We want to keep hearing from the community because it will help us make Lens better for everybody.

Today, the Lens open source project on GitHub has around 400 open Issues. Luckily, the situation is not yet out of control because we have an awesome team of maintainers and volunteers who help out with triaging issues, answer questions, ask for more information when needed, and much more.

As the Lens community grows, managing issues and feedback is taking more and more of our time. We want to provide community support as fast as possible, but at the same time, we want to have time to develop new features that are impactful and squash bugs at increased velocity. Because of this, we are now trying to find better ways to:

• Keep on providing community support as fast as possible
• Focus on features that are most impactful
• Prioritize issues that may be fixed now

I want to make it clear: we are not trying to get down to zero open issues. There’s always going to be something for us to work on and something to improve. We are always going to work on new and cool features. We want to be proactive and avoid situations where the number of issues is getting out of hand, and we cannot provide quality support.

Discussions On Slack

The Lens Community Slack is for asking questions, having discussions, debating theories, and helping others.

Sometimes, we can see discussions happening over at Slack, leading to a discovery of a bug. The Lens Team maintainers do not have the capacity to scan and create issues automatically originating from these discussions. We kindly ask people participating in any such discussions to submit proper GitHub issues to get on Lens maintainers’ radar. In case additional information is requested, this information should be added to the GitHub issue.

Bugs, Feature Requests and Enhancement Ideas on GitHub Issues

GitHub Issues are meant for submitting bugs, feature requests, and enhancement ideas. Often, they have an obvious definition of “done.” They may be fixed, improved, added, or completed in some fashion.

Sometimes, we can see GitHub issues that are not bugs, feature requests, or enhancement ideas. They are questions or openings for discussion that may be answered by anyone in the community. They are not exclusive to Lens maintainers. For feedback like this, we kindly ask to use Community Slack instead. The reason is that we want people to get the help they need as quickly as possible.

Issues That Can Not Be Completed

The whole point of issues is that they may be fixed, improved, added, or completed in some fashion. Sometimes reported issues are very vague. There is no way to tell when they are actually completed, or they are chores that never get done.

When we see an issue like this, we will ask the original author of the issue to clarify the definition of “done.” We can and will help with this process, but if the goal remains vague, or in the maintainers’ estimation, is unachievable, we will close the issue.

Abandoned Issues

Just like with any open source project, sometimes issues will get abandoned. There might be many reasons, but let’s talk about the most common reason: maintainers might request additional information from the original issue author from time to time. If the maintainers can’t get the information they need, the issue might get lost and never move forward. While we’d like to get feedback for any additional information requests as soon as possible, we also understand that people have busy lives. Sometimes, they simply can’t get back to us or have forgotten the context of an issue.

In order to focus on moving issues forward and ultimately to get them resolved, we are expecting feedback from the original issue author within a week. If we don’t receive feedback, we’ll give a gentle reminder. If we don’t get any feedback within 30 days, we will close the issue.

Summary

We are proactively trying to improve the Lens open source project processes to improve community support quality, increase the velocity of fixing bugs, and have time to work on exciting new features. We want to be as responsive and as transparent as possible with these changes. We will continue to iterate on these things also in the future to find a model that will serve the Lens community best. If you have any questions or want to discuss any of this, please feel free to offer feedback via Lens Community Slack!