GitHub Issue Management¶

Drake uses GitHub issues to coordinate bug resolution and feature development. We organize issues using labels. Each label uses the format group: value, where group is one of the following:

team: Indicates the engineering team that owns the issue.
component: Indicates the primary affected feature area.
type: Indicates the nature of the issue.
priority: Indicates the urgency of resolution.
configuration: The supported configurations affected, if applicable.
status: PRs only. Indicates the status of the PR.

Please only assign labels if you are reasonably confident they are correct. The Drake development team will apply appropriate labels later as needed.

Owner¶

Every issue must have at least one owner assigned.

Team¶

Every issue must have at least one team label. The teams, their leads, and their responsibilities are:

dynamics

lead: sherm1

responsibilities: physical accuracy, numerical methods, collision, systems framework
kitware

lead: jamiesnape

responsibilities: build, continuous integration
manipulation

lead: hongkai-dai

responsibilities: optimizers, solvers, symbolic analysis, drake/manipulation/ subdirectory
robot locomotion group

lead: RussTedrake

responsibilities: examples/requests from MIT projects / MIT courses

Component¶

Every issue must have at most one component label. The components are:

build system

Bazel, CMake, dependencies, memory checkers, linters, etc.

typical team: kitware
continuous integration

Jenkins, CDash, mirroring of externals, Drake website, etc.

typical team: kitware
distribution

Nightly binaries, monthly releases, docker, installation via apt or brew, etc.

typical team: kitware
geometry externals

VTK, FCL, drake_visualizer (core behavior), etc.

typical team: kitware
geometry general

Geometry infrastructure or topics that defy categorization into other geometry components.

typical team: dynamics
geometry illustration

What and how geometry gets communicated to external visualizers.

typical team: dynamics
geometry perception

How geometry appears in color, depth, and label images (via the RenderEngine API).

typical team: dynamics
geometry proximity

Contact, distance, signed distance queries and related properties.

typical team: dynamics
jupyter

Jupyter notebook infrastructure, Binder integration, etc.

Note: This label does not imply content authoring for tutorials.

typical team: kitware
mathematical program

Formulating and solving mathematical programs through numerical optimization, usually in drake/solvers.

typical team: manipulation
multibody plant

MultibodyPlant and related code and documentation usually in drake/multibody.

typical team: dynamics
pydrake

Python API and documentation under //bindings/pydrake (and its supporting Starlark macros), the RobotLocomotion/pybind11 fork, etc.

typical team: kitware
simulator

Simulator, integrators, and related code and documentation, usually in drake/systems/analysis.

typical team: dynamics
system framework

System, Context, and related code and documentation, usually in drake/systems/framework.

typical team: dynamics

Priority¶

The emergency priority indicates that the owning team should not work on anything else until the issue is resolved.

The other priorities are determined by the owning team. The following rules of thumb may be useful for issues:

priority: high - planned to receive attention within the month.
priority: medium - planned to receive attention within the quarter.
priority: low - planned for a subsequent quarter.
priority: backlog - will be handled on an ad-hoc basis, as time permits.

Configuration¶

An issue may have configuration label(s) such as linux, mac, python, etc. If no configuration label is present, the issue is assumed to affect all configurations.

Status¶

For the most part, we rely on reviewable.io to communicate PR status. Status labels are optional, but Drake developers managing the PR queue will respect them.

do not review: Use this status to indicate you do not want anyone to review your PR right now. This is useful if you created the PR to trigger CI and plan to iterate on the results. Even if this flag is absent, you are responsible for finding reviewers, as documented in developers. This flag simply protects you from unsolicited review.
do not merge: Use this status to indicate you do not want anyone to merge your PR right now, even if it passes all pre-merge checks. This is useful if you have minor post-LGTM changes to make, or if you need to coordinate the precise timing of the merge. If pre-merge checks are green and this flag is absent, a Drake administrator may merge your PR at any time.