A couple steps to help us in prioritizing Issues but still get stuff done

["Barnum, Sean D." <sbarnum@mitre.org>]

All,

We’ve discussed recently how we are going to handle prioritizing issues to determine in what order we will discuss and dispose of them. 

On the last STIX meeting call we talked about a few technical options for supporting tracked “voting” by all STIX SC members. They all have their up sides and down sides. 

Several members suggested that the co-chairs just consider the issues and suggest a roadmap and adjust for any expressed disagreement from members.

A couple of members expressed opinions that an explicit “voting” (opinion expressing) mechanism is desired. 

Most voices have been relatively silent either way. We presume this is likely due to a desire to just keep moving rather than continue to worry about an optimal solution.

In the interest of “getting stuff done” we recently proposed an initial focus on two specific issues (Sightings and Relationships) and heard no objections to this.

As the traffic on the list demonstrates we continue to have great discussions on these topics.

We want to keep the progress moving once we are ready to move beyond these initial two issues. 

We also recognize that the 155 open issues in the tracker are a pretty big bite to swallow in one go.

In an attempt to try to reduce everyone’s bite size and assist in narrowing down what the highest priority items might be I have taken an initial triage pass through the open tracker issues and labeled them as Tier1, Tier2 or Tier3.

I have created a wiki page (https://github.com/STIXProject/specifications/wiki/STIX-2.0-Issue-Triage) to explain the triage and provide dynamic links into the trackers to let you see just specifically labeled issues.

The criteria I used for this triage are:

• Tier1 is defined as: Issues of high community-voiced importance/interest and/or high architectural significance.
• Tier2 is defined as: Issues of moderate community-voiced importance/interest and low-mid architectural significance.
• Tier3 is defined as: Issues of low strategic relevance or active interest.

This is an initial subjective cut by me and we welcome feedback from you on any issues where you disagree with the triage category. For any issues that you think should be higher or lower level in the triage let us know.

We recognize that this does not magically solve everything  and reduce our open issues to only a handful but we hope that it will be a useful step in helping us tackle the work in front of us.

In addition to the priority triage I also applied a few new labels to issues based on some patterns of common types of issues I noticed when reviewing the list.

There are currently four of these: Abstraction related issues, Relationship related issues, Incident related issues and Vocabulary related issues. Dynamic links are also provided for these on the wiki page.

If you have ideas for other similar grouping factors let us know.

This does not mean that we have completely discounted the desire for a more explicit and granular mechanism for folks to express priority opinions on the issues. We will continue to look into approaches and encourage ideas and contributions from the SC on this matter. 

For now we want to focus on getting things done and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

sean