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.
  • 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 to issues during the weekly scrub.

Owner

All GitHub issues should have an owner. The Platform Reviewer should check once per day that all unassigned issues have an appropriate owner.

Team

Every issue must have at least one team label. If no team agrees to own an issue, the issue will be closed with an explanation. The teams, their leads, and their responsibilities are:

  • automotive

    lead: jwnimmer-tri

    responsibilities: drake/automotive/ subdirectory

  • 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 and 6.832

    lead: RussTedrake

    responsibilities: MIT CSAIL research lab / MIT courses

Type

Every issue must have at least one type, and typically should have exactly one. Issues that require a code change will typically have type bug, feature request, or cleanup. There are a number of niche types for other kinds of issues, and the exact set is expected to evolve over time.

Priority

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

The high, medium, low, and backlog priority levels have semantics determined by the owning team. The following rules of thumb may be useful:

  • high-priority issues are planned to receive attention within the month.
  • medium-priority issues are planned to receive attention within the quarter.
  • low-priority issues may be planned for a subsequent quarter.
  • backlog-priority issues 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.