Talk:Bug management/Assignee cleanup

The email does not provide a way forward if you want to keep an assignment, which I consider rather tedious.

@MGChecker Hi, you are free to assign a task to yourself again in case that you get unassigned from a task but plan to work on this task in the near future.

@MGChecker To elaborate a bit: There is a tradeoff here, and I'm not sure how to better approach it.

On the one hand, we do have a bit of a problem with overcommitting / wishful planning. Which leads to cookielicking. (I believe that every open project has this problem, because we are humans.)

On the other hand, there will also always be some folks who have been assigned to tasks for a long time but who will actually and realistically resolve [some of] their tasks quite soon. Which is great.

I do hope that the 'interruption' created by these four emails send per year will help some folks spend a moment to reflect if they will really still work on the tasks that they claimed. If so, they are very welcome to un- and reassign a task to express that, and they will not be bothered again for (currently) another two years about these tasks.

I guess I could try to manually maintain a "Don't unassign person X from task Y" list but I'm afraid that this won't scale and won't solve the problem in the long run.

If you have ideas of a better approach (or things to better cover and explain in the emails or on this wiki page), then please let me know. Happy to hear and discuss them. Thanks a lot!

I do not know if it is easy, but one could exempt tasks from unassignmment where the assignee has been active since the first reminder.

I understand why we do this, and am generally in favor of this process. However, getting an email with subject [ACTION REQUIRED] which does not suggest an appropriate action for each sensible scenario seems unfortunate.

I think this would be a good idea. In https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/assigned/ there is a second column that shows the last active date. Maybe this can be used for filtering?

Currently there will be no second email (reminder) about a task if a task has been either unassigned, or reassigned since the first email - see the sentence

If you will work on a task soon and want to stay assigned, please remove yourself as assignee and then assign it again to yourself.

in the initial email. (The "last active date" can mean any activity by anyone unfortunately.)

Before sending the second email I think it would be technically possible to first query each task for recent activity of each assignee since the first email. It adds more complexity (it already is quite complex) but feel free to file a feature request in Phab under #Developer-Advocacy and assign it to me! Thanks