Synching Actions Across GitHub/Team Boards

Owned by Michelle Philbrick
Last updated: Jun 28, 2023
2 min read

These are meeting notes from a discussion on June 21, 2023 regarding visibility and assignment of pull requests across multiple boards. This came out of a specific case relating to the edX/2U Credentials board, the community Contributions board and the edX Maintenance board, though it has broader potential and includes some updates to GitHub assignees and labels.

Meeting Notes from June 21, 2023

Attendees: @Michelle Philbrick @Feanil Patel @Tim Krones @Kelly Buchanan @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) @Kyle McCormick @Jeremy Bowman (Deactivated)

Meeting Context

There are important credentials and certificate-related pull requests that come in both internally and from community contributors, however, these are all spread across multiple repos, boards, and statuses making it difficult for the owning team to locate and properly triage, prioritize and review.

Problem(s) to Solve For

The Aperture team at 2U needs a better way to quickly see which pull requests need attention, while at the same time aligning with the edX Maintenance board, and making it clear to the OSPR project managers what the status is for the ones that are open-source-contributions on the Contributions board. This means finding a way to uniformly show the current state of the pull requests across multiple boards that all have different status columns.

Decisions + Solutions to Try

  1. Standardize using the pull request “Assignees” field

    1. The person listed in this field is the one responsible for getting the pull request to “done”

    2. Will be self-assigned by owning team, or assigned to a CC by OSPR managers (if owning team decides they don’t need to be involved in the review process).

  2. New labels added to all repos ( Labels are preferred over board status since all boards are set up differently. Labels provide a way to sync across boards in a standard way, while allowing OSPR project managers and individual teams to set up and manage their boards in a way that is most helpful to them).

    1. New label “Waiting for Eng Review” - for use by the OSPR project managers to highlight pull requests that need review ( Pull requests that need product review have separate labels and process for this).

    2. New label “Needs Maintainer Attention” - for use by the reviewing teams/owners to flag pull requests that need to be looked at, and have someone assigned to them.