Previous posts in the series: https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/OeN8o14s6Jc/m/ChnpijP3AgAJ, https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/xBzaINHWwUQ/m/Tq17YRqOAAAJ, https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/6HO1HEtL1Fs/m/2yBTxg6QBgAJ
A key reason for the extraordinary success of GitHub Issues and Pull Requests (and their equivalents in other systems) as productivity tools in the software development world is the sharp and narrow focus of the discussions there. What may often be overlooked though is how crucial keeping this sharp and narrow focus is for the inclusion of neurodiverse/neurodivergent participants in the community. Meandering discussions without clear scope or goal, general chatter, off-topic comments, etc. can make the discussion simply inaccessible to these participants, and distractions by off-topic comments from the technical content of the discussion can dramatically reduce these participants' productivity. But also for neurotypical participants, off-topic noise in discussions can be a problem, and there is a separate serious inclusion issue. As just one example, consider a new contributor who looks up a PR interesting to them, but the discussion appears to be between senior contributors on matters apparently unrelated to the PR. This can create the doubt whether review comments are still welcome. Experienced developers usually open Issues and Pull Requests with a suitable, sufficiently narrow scope. But when the scope of an Issue/PR or focus of a discussion at some point is recognized as not suitable (usually too wide), then various tools and actions are available to Maintainers (and some to other participants) to take corrective action. Examples: - Opening one or several separate Issues, each with a clearer, narrower focus - Closing an Issue in favor of the opened separate Issues (the old Issue should be referenced in the newly opened Issues) - Updating title / description of the Issue to reflect the main focus of the discussion (old titles and old versions of the description can still be accessed) - Marking comments as "off-topic", "outdated", or "resolved" (see https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/Sm-HG9zQTQY/m/Ffs3CIPMAgAJ); people with read access to the repository can simply click on them to expand them - Cherry-picking parts of a PR that can be reviewed more easily and opening a separate PR for them for review (this creates development velocity and also facilitates review of the original PR, which becomes smaller after the split-out PR has been merged into the mainline). All of these are routinely done by responsible Maintainers in well-run software development projects. I suggest that we revise our Developer Guide to include a discussion of these and other important topics. Matthias -- Dr. Matthias Koeppe . . . . . . . . http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mkoeppe Professor of Mathematics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/CAJ_wo5hHz6-0RxF0wbFzezZArr2S1daY%2B40ksV%2BjFYBu1QvseA%40mail.gmail.com.
