Examples of Good Issues

Here are the key criteria that we’ve curated when creating a good issue for CodeDay Labs:

The end goal is clearly explained

• Clearly articulate the expected behavior of the issue

• Call to action

• Example:

  The dialog box should have a button that, when clicked, closes the pop-up

Starting points for how to solve the problem are provided

• Important: make sure to ONLY give starting points and not specific steps to solve the issue

• Giving students all the steps will remove the “discovery” aspect of solving a problem; it’s like they’re reading an instruction booklet

• Examples:

  Here is a StackOverflow thread that talks about behavior similar to the bug

  Here is a Python library that implements some of new functionality

Descriptive background for the issue

• Clear and concise title that accurately reflects the issue
• Steps to reproduce the issue
• Relevant code snippets or screenshots
• Error messages, if applicable
• Any attempted solutions or workarounds that have been tried but failed
• Any additional context or information that may be helpful to solving the issue, such as browser or operating system being used

Size of the task

• Bite-sized tasks
• Scale is important here; these are typically small things that seasoned developers would take 30 minutes to solve