As a user, I would like to set a count limit for team reminders

[abinoda]

Requested by @xinzweb from Pivotal/Greenplum:

For the Team Reminder Setting, is there anyway to add a top N field? E.g. instead of seeing all the PRs (probably 20+) older than 72 hours, I want to see just top 5, and let people focus on just those top ones.

[abinoda]

Curious to know if other OSS maintainers would find this useful – @tas50 @johannasmith @majormoses @bootstraponline @damacus

[majormoses]

I could see it being useful, how would we determine what's top n? age? comments? etc.

[abinoda]

@majormoses Good question. Sorting right now is based on staleness, so I'd assumed it'd cap based on that.

[bootstraponline]

For my use case it's necessary to see all PRs.

[majormoses]

To clarify I probably would not use that as we use labels to filter out requests that are waiting for feedback but I can see it being useful while say working to pay down a lot of tech debt..

[xinzweb]

If people want to see ALL PR, then just make the limit 0. Otherwise, any positive number can help reduce the limit.

The challenge I have so far is that we have 30+ PRs need attention (not meeting the SLA), and if we just focus the top 10, it can directly bring down the overall staleness of the PRs.

Without a focus, the list is just getting longer and longer, and people has to scroll back to see what's the top stale PR in order to take action on them.

Hope the additional context will help.

Thanks, Shin

[majormoses]

@xinzweb yup I understand the use case, in the meantime I would suggest maybe using some label filters to either include/exclude pull requests.

[xinzweb]

Yes, I do have label to exclude the PR. In this case, I do want to see the top X stale PRs which are not labelled away.

Or, we can sort the PR list in the reversed order of the staleness? That will leave the stalest one on the bottom instead of on the top. It's easier to find the stalest one and focus on it.

Thanks.

[xinzweb]

Thanks for considering this feature to the future, but I am wondering what additional context I can provide to prioritize this feature.

Currently, not all the GPDB open source committers are checking the PR reminders. They probably just directly check the pulls and go to the last page to see if anything super stale there.

I'd like to use this top N feature to short the long PR list in the slack channel since people really don't bother to scroll up to see the top staled PRs.

Thanks.

[abinoda]

Hi @xinzweb thanks for nudging this. We'd be happy to add this feature, but before that I'd like to ask about your process in case there are other potential solutions. Currently, how do you decide and track who on your team should reviews what PR? Do you use review requests?

[xinzweb]

Yes, we do use review request. We have multiple teams tracking the backlog, and they are only looking at their own components, and sometimes, that left a gap, and we need to keep an eye on those items fall behind. I hope it's helpful. Thanks.

[abinoda]

@xinzweb I'm closing this issue because we're about to update the Slack message formatting which will automatically truncate the message beyond a certain length. The change should go out over the weekend – please let me know if the change doesn't address your original issue.

[abinoda]

@xinzweb I spoke too soon :/ Question, though. Could you increase the "min staleness" to a higher level (even though its above your SLA) to reduce list length until your team gets more caught up?

[xinzweb]

I see, that's a good idea. I just bump it to 2 weeks stale (very stale). That will probably reduce my list. Thanks a lot.