How to Run a Triage Meeting

Overview

We need to help keep the Starchart and Telescope projects in a healthy state. This needs to happen on a number of fronts, including:

• keeping the list of open issues in a productive state
• making sure pull requests are being reviewed in a timely manner
• making sure that any issues/pull requests that are stuck, or need follow-up, get identified and resourced
• helping to unblock people from accomplishing their work

Ideas for Running the Weekly Meeting

Each week we hold a Triage Meeting. The meeting is run by the Sheriffs, who also record notes about attendance, what was discussed, and any decisions that were made (e.g., who is working on what?).

Roles

1. One of the Sheriffs is in charge of taking notes, which need to be made public at the end of the meeting (e.g., in the wiki)
2. The second Sherrif leads the discussion with the team, keeping everything on track and progressing. The goal of the meeting isn't to solve everything during the meeting, but to make sure that the right people are assigned responsibility to follow-up after the meeting.
3. All other team members are encouraged to work along on their laptop (e.g., in GitHub), and join the discussion. Triage is a group activity requiring everyone's expertise and participation.

Suggested Flow

1. Start with Pull Requests.
   • Are there any open pull requests that need review?
   • Who should do the reviews? Make sure they get assigned.
   • Are there pull requests from community members? Let's prioritize these.
   • Do any of the open pull requests need additional follow-up, or can they be closed?
2. Next, are there any new "show-stopper" Issues we need to discuss and/or file as a group? For example, recent crash, test failure, broken dev environments, etc.
   • Who will take care of filing these issues?
   • Who will own them and make sure they get fixed and reviewed?
3. Next, do our core team members have Issues assigned to them for this week?
   • Check the current release and make sure everyone on the team has assigned work
   • Discuss any outstanding Issues that need an owner, and try to find one
4. Next, look through the current list of Issues for this week's milestone
   • Is anything in here at risk of not being done?
   • Are we stuck on something?
   • Can we do anything to remove the risk that this will slip out of this milestone?
   • Who needs to get involved and what do they need to do?
5. Next, go back to the existing Issues and start working through them in reverse order (oldest to newest).
   • Are there any issues we can close?
     • no longer exists
     • no longer a priority
     • can't reproduce it
     • duplicate of another issue
   • If we are going to keep it open, do we have a plan for when we'll do it? Is something else blocking it from happening?
   • Are there any Labels we can add, or other information, to make an Issue easier to find and fix?