Type:Undefined issues are driven down to near zero

Per https://app.periscopedata.com/app/gitlab/1042933/Issue-Types-by-Milestone as of Jul 27

• 15.3 was 13%
• 15.4 is at 9.7%

Actions to take:

• Communicate this expectation across the quad leaders
• Study the commonalities on the unassigned issues
• Make the appropriate team members aware of them
• Improve ability to find the undefined issues
• Track progress over time

How to find the undefined issues

1. Go to this dashboard: https://app.periscopedata.com/app/gitlab/1042933/Issue-Types-by-Milestone
2. Filter by section and/or stage and/or team group as appropriate
3. View the Project search for undefined issues table
4. Click on the search URL link, and add to it any stage or group labels as appropriate

Short video demonstration: https://youtu.be/JMTlgI5PzjQ

Note:

• The dashboards lag the issues themselves by at least 48 hours. This is why it is better to search the issues themselves for ones without labels, rather than viewing a list of likely out-of-date issues in the dashboard. This is also why the counts of issues may not match between the dashboard and the issues themselves.
• Issues can be in multiple projects and the issue search is per project in GitLab. This is why there is a different search for each project

Previous notes

15.3 has 221 issues (13% of the total issues of 1705) in gitlab.org without a type label: * All issues: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?sort=created_asc&state=opened&milestone_title=15.3 * Issues without a type label: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?sort=created_asc&state=opened&milestone_title=15.3&not%5Blabel_name%5D%5B%5D=type%3A%3Abug&not%5Blabel_name%5D%5B%5D=type%3A%3Afeature&not%5Blabel_name%5D%5B%5D=type%3A%3Amaintenance&first_page_size=20

Exporting the issues, copying the labels into a file, then running this shell script gives us the top labels with undefined issues: sed $'s/,/\\\n/g' rawlabels | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | more

Top occurrences of the stage and devops scope label:

• dev - 106 (PM @ogolowinski )
  • create - 75 (Development @dsatcher, PM @sarahwaldner )
  • manage - 15 (Development @m_gill, PM @nagyv-gitlab )
• ops - 23 (PM @kencjohnston )
  • verify - 9 (Development @cheryl.li , PM @jreporter )
• plan - 9 (Development @johnhope, PM @mushakov )

Top occurrences of the group scope label:

• source code - 32 (Development @sean_carroll (BE), @andr3 (FE), PM @tlinz )
• code review - 14 (Development @mnohr (BE), @andr3 (FE) , PM @phikai )
• product planning - 11 (Development @johnhope, PM @mushakov )

Top occurrences of author:

• Zeff Morgan @zeffmorgan 14
• Sean Gregory @sgregory2 11
• Will Meek @willmeek 10

Top occurrences of assignee:

• Amy Qualls @aqualls 11
• Mark Lapeierre @mlapierre 6
• Justin Mandell @jmandell 5
• Andy Volpe @andyvolpe 4

I also looked at the common words in the title of the issues but didn't see any notable trends.

Please note that the DRIs need to search for issues in all gitlab-org projects as the dashboard picks up all of them while the searches have to be per project. Many of the searches in the description search one project only. Some examples for one subset (I randomly chose create to compare) is that these issues don't show up as undefined in the search, but they do in the dashboards:

• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/-/issues/2028
• gitlab-org/gitaly#1337 (closed)

If found these differences by going through the undefined issue types table and sorting by milestone.