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Title: Issue trackers are garbage (and here's why)
Category: Blog
Tags: /dev/diary, dev culture,
Date: 2019-10-10
Status: Draft
> We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was
> us that invented **issue trackers**. At the time development was very
> chaotic and it was believed that they would bring **order into the
> chaos**.
Whenever I talk to people about making FOSS projects more
approachable, one thing that always comes up is issue trackers. "Label
your issues", they say, "Mark them as 'good first issue'", they
say. This is, of course, to make it easier for newcomers to see what
needs to be done, where they can help, or even just have a place to
ping for mentoring.
So far so good.
I will now prove that this is the only area where issue trackers are
good. And in fact, how this same workflow can be entirely implemented
in either a shared edit pad, or a mailing list.
## Bloat
The central problem of issue trackers, like with most things in life,
is people. People who create new issues, without searching for one
that already exists. People who forget about updating or closing their
issues or just fail to add relevant tags and write a descriptive
text. Who needs more than the title?
This results in many issue trackers accumilating so much information
that it becomes impossible for anyone to understand it anymore. It's
common for larger, long-running projects to purge their issue trackers
from time to time, hinting that there might be a problem in the
accumilation of bloat.
Another approach is to do "triage" regularly, meaning that the
update-purge cycle gets done on a smaller scale, but more
regularly. Other projects ignore their issue trackers, letting
thousands of them build up and embracing that information will be
duplicated.
Interestingly enough, vey often the people doing the most work have
the least interaction with issue trackers. PRs and reviews, yes, those
are somewhat useful tools. But issue trackers, very much not so.
In the end, issues become a kind of forum where people can discuss
their problems or ideas. Do you know what else is kinda like a forum?
A mailing list.
## Onboarding? ONBOARDING?!
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