Automation Hero

• Priority: Very High
• Knowledge required: DevOps, scripting
• Status: Open

Currently, we handle all lifecycle of issues and PRs manually. There is a limited automation which checks for PR title and description and another which adds explanatory comment to good first issues.

Due to the lack of automation, we encounter problems such as:

• Issues that are open for 2+ years and no longer getting attention. Are they still relevant? Are the issues still existing in the current version of the system?
• PRs can be left open for weeks without any reviews. This definitely acts as a big deterrent to anyone trying to contribute.

Those are signs of unhealthy project velocity and need to be fixed.

We can make use of GitHub Actions for some pre-ready functions such as checking and closing stale issues/PRs, or create our own scripts for actions that are not natively supported.

Some of the things we want to achieve include, but not limited to:

• The list of open issues are kept up-to-date with stale issues being periodically closed.
• PRs are checked for sanity, e.g. it addresses an open issue, has the correct title/description.
• PRs get timely review, with periodic reminders if the assigned reviewers are not attending to them.