Guidance on assigning issues

⚠️ This wiki page is a work in progress. It is being trialled on the web app team.

Who is this guidance for?

This guidance is for the web team triagers.

External contributors and internship candidates may find this document helpful to set expectations.

For internal contributors

Element employees and interns can assign tasks to themselves if they are intending to work on them. All developers should review their tasks periodically and unassign any as needed.

For new features, try to assign all development issues to the developer if possible (we can acknowledge that some teams have multiple developers and we may not know who will be working on a given issue) and link issues to the corresponding epic. These are hints to external contributors that these issues should not be picked up.

For external contributors and potential interns

If the contributor is new, they can comment that they are interested in working on the issue but we will not assign the issue to them until there is at least a draft PR which looks promising. If the contributor would like technical support, we will refer them to #element-dev:matrix.org for help.

If any element developer would like to assist an external contributor, they can do so at their own discretion.

The above guidance will apply to Outreachy candidates, GSoC candidates and Hacktoberfest contributors.

For contributors who have prior contributions to Element, any triager may assign the issue to the external contributor at their discretion.