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Issue and Feature Labeling

On Amundsen, we aim to be methodical on using issue labels, offering our community a way to understand what are the issues about and their status within or development process.

We use a bunch of GitHub labels. They are a mix of custom labels and the default Github labels for open-source projects. We base these labels on four main types: status labels, issue type labels, area labels, and the “other” category. Read on to learn more about them.

Status Labels

  • They show at a glance the status and progress of each issue
  • Prefixed with “Status:”, followed by the label
  • Only one status label will be applied to any particular issue

Labels

  • status:needs_triage – For all issues that need to be processed
  • status:needs_reproducing – For bugs that need to be reproduced in order to get fixed
  • status:needs_votes – Issue or bug fix that needs support from the community to be considered
  • status:in_progress – Issue that is being worked on right now.
  • status:completed – Issue is completed and on main
  • status:abandoned – Issue we won’t go ahead and implement, or that needs a “champion” to take it through
  • status:blocked – Issue blocked by any reason (dependencies, previous work, lack of resources, etc.)

Here is a diagram representing these states within the lifecycles: Feature and Bug Lifecycle

Type Labels

  • They show the type of the issue
  • Prefixed with “Type:”, followed by the label

Labels

  • type:bug – An unexpected problem or unintended behavior
  • type:feature – A new feature request
  • type:maintenance – A regular maintenance chore or task, including refactors, build system, CI, performance improvements
  • type:documentation – A documentation improvement task
  • type:question – An issue or PR that needs more information or a user question

Area Labels

  • They indicate which area of the project the issue refers to
  • Prefixed with “Area:”, followed by the name of the project

Labels

  • area:common – From common
  • area:databuilder – From databuilder
  • area:frontend – From frontend
  • area:metadata – From metadata library
  • area:search – From search library
  • area:k8s – Related to the Kubernetes helm chart
  • area:all – Related to all the projects above

Other Labels

  • Some of these are part of the standard GitHub labels and intended for OSS contributors
  • Some are related to the tools we use to maintain the library
  • They are not prefixed

Labels

  • help wanted – Indicates we are looking for contributors on this issue.
  • good first issue – Indicates the issue is a great one to tackle by newcomers to the project or OSS in general.
  • rfc - Indicates that there is an RFC associated with this issue.