title: “Issue Priorities”

GitHub Issue Priorities

P0: Outage

Expectation: Drop everything else and work continuously to resolve. An outage means that some piece of infrastructure that the community relies on is down. A P0 issue is more urgent than simply blocking the next release.

Example P0 issues:

  • the build is broken, halting all development
  • the website is down
  • a vulnerability requires a point release ASAP

P1: Critical

Expectation: Continuous status updates. P1 bugs should not be unassigned. Most P1 bugs should block release.

Example P1 issues:

  • data loss error
  • important component is nonfunctional for important use cases
  • major performance regression
  • security related issues (CVEs)
  • failing postcommit test
  • flaky test

P2: Default

Expectation: Most tickets fall into this priority. These can be planned and executed by anyone who is interested. No special urgency is associated, but if no action is taken on a P2 ticket for a long time, it indicates it is actually just P3/nice-to-have.

Example P2 issues

  • typical feature request
  • bug that affects some use cases but don't make a component nonfunctional
  • ignored (“sickbayed”) test

P3: Nice-to-have

Expectation: Nice-to-have improvements.

Example P3 issues

  • feature request that is nice-to-have
  • ticket filed as P2 that no one finds time to work on

P4

Expectation: Nice-to-have improvements that are also very small and easy. Usually it is quicker to just fix them than to file a bug, but the issue can be referenced by a pull request and shows up in release notes.

Example P4 issues

  • spelling errors in comments or code