Guidelines on when to reopen or create a new Issue

Problem statement

The Secure team brought this up to our attention earlier. We don't really have a clear guideline on when reopen existing issue or create a new issue is appropriate.

Datapoints

These are points from the meeting with the ~Secure team, extracted out to just the impactful notes.

Full meeting note can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w5n7j8Pqu7NbQvPQlX-xg5nhF-RuxScrL-iKHAa6_Q4/edit

When is it OK to reopen an issue? To me, one shouldn’t reopen what’s been shipped else we can’t properly track regressions. Also, it messes with milestones and labels, thus with planning. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/5763. Similar issue: users tend to abuse comments in closed issues to report bugs and unsupported edge cases for a feature that has been shipped.

Reopen is not the best. We can use links between issues to help providing the context of the initial issue but if it has been fixed and then reappear later then something new may come into play so it’s better starting a fresh discussion.

If the closed issue actually solved the problem, and the new one is just “related”, but not the same. In this case, a new issue is a good idea. But if we just closed the original issue because we were considering it done, but it is not, reopening also makes sense.

In addition to this we should also take into consideration other aspects of relevancy

  • Context: What is the context differentiation between the old issue and a one we may want to create.
    • How much context needs to be preserved ?
    • What were the problems that we haven’t addressed or have addressed ?
    • If we solved >80% of the original scope we should create a new issue.
  • Timespan: Revising context makes sense if an event happened recently.
    • How long has the original issue been created before it was closed for ? If it was fairly recent, reopen seems appropriate.

Proposal

FEATURES

  • Reopen: If work can still be done in the same milestone for the issue.
  • Create New: If the closed issue is scheduled to a past milestone (closed milestone).

BUGS/REGRESSIONS

I am involving the folks who I see have been reopening issues/bugs for a good reason: @stanhu @jramsay @filipa @joshlambert

Folks from ~Secure who brought this up initially: @fcatteau @gonzoyumo @plafoucriere @bikebilly

And folks from Quality who had this discussion before: @godfat @mlapierre

Edited by Mek Stittri