Drupal's issue queues are moving to GitLab, and it's happening one project at a time. For the last few months I've been working on a tool that helps contributors find issues worth working on, which helps contributors find issues worth working on. But as I was building it, I kept running into the same frustrating problem: a lot of issues just seem to stall and go nowhere.
One thread stuck with me. Somebody took the time to write a thoughtful review, but nobody replied to it. Instead, the status kept changing from "Needs work" to "Needs review" and back again, twice in three days, while the review just sat there. It made me think, if I had been the one who wrote that review, I'm not sure I would have been motivated to come back.
I took a closer look at the data I'd collected, and what I found surprised me, Out of over 138,000 open issues, around 80% of RTBC issues from the past three years haven't moved in more than 90 days. Someone's written the fix, someone else has reviewed it, but it's just sitting there. To get a better sense of what's going on, I read the last comment on 1,000 of these stalled issues and sorted them by what seemed to be the main problem.
Most of these issues didn't get stuck on tough coding problems. Instead, they got held up on smaller things, like a question nobody answered, or a fix that worked for someone who never came back to say so.
I want to share what I've learned, like who typically needs to take the next step and how many of these roadblocks could have been prevented. I'll also give you a quick look at how the issues the community thinks are important compare to the ones that actually get committed. The gap caught me off guard.
You'll get a simple checklist to go through before you pick up an issue, and some helpful tips for when your issue stops making progress.
Who is this for
This is for you if
-
you've ever submitted a patch or a review and been left wondering what happened next,
-
you're new to contributing,
-
you only contribute every now and then
-
Mentor and lead sprint and pick issues for others
-
you're a maintainer, you'll probably recognize your own queue.
What you will learn
- The most common reasons Drupal issues get stuck, from real queue data
- How to check in under a minute whether an issue is worth picking up
- How to write comments and reviews that a maintainer can act on
- When to nudge, when to summarize, and when to move on
- Why issues tagged as important often take longer to land