Monorail Triage Guide (go/monorail-triage)

Monorail is a tool that is actively used and maintained by the Chromium community. It is important that we look at issues reported by our users and take appropriate actions.

For the full list of trooper responsibilities, see go/chops-workflow-trooper.

Triage Process

Look at each issue in the Monorail untriaged queue and Sheriffbot untriaged queue and do the following:

  • If the issue is unintelligible or empty, flag the issue as spam.
    • Check the user stats at bugs.chromium.org/u/{user_email}/updates, and if none of their activities on the site are serious or valid, ban them as spammer.
  • Move issues to the correct project (eg. "chromium") if misfiled.
  • Apply the correct type: label.
  • If the bug is caused by someone else's changes or if the bug is part of the feature clearly owned by one person, assign the issue to that person and set status:Assigned.
  • Validate the issue and make it clear and actionable
    • If not actionable or reproducible, mark issue as status:WontFix
    • If the issue requires more information from reporter, add the label needs:Feedback and ask the reporter for more information.
  • Update issue Pri- label
    • If the issue is a Monorail API Request, set Pri-1
    • If the issue is a security or privacy issue, set Pri-1
    • Refer to Priorities for all other cases.
  • If the issue is Pri-0 or Pri-1
    • If Pri-0: assign self as owner, mark status:Started, notify team leads, follow the IRM process as Incident Commander.
    • If Pri-1: assign self as owner, mark status:Started and work to resolve the issue. Find another owner and make a formal handoff if you are not able to address.
  • If an issue has been needs:Feedback for more than 7 days without response, mark as status:WontFix with an explanatory comment.
  • Otherwise, mark issue as status:Available

Priorities

  • Pri-0: Critical issue causing failures in production. Major functionality broken that renders a feature unusable for all customers.
  • Pri-1: Urgent; the issue is blocking a user from getting their job done. Defect causing functional regression in production. Production issue impacting other customers. Any type of security or privacy problem. Finally, any workflow administrative tasks that have been officially asked to the trooper to handle, that includes very explicitly: Monorail API access request, Sheriffbot testing & deployment, and Hotlist removal.
  • Pri-2: Important; tied to OKRs or near term upcoming release. Bug that should be addressed in one of the next few releases.
  • Pri-3: We feel your pain: the team would like to fix this, but lacks the resources to do this soon. Desirable feature or enhancement not on the near-term roadmap. Defects that are not regressions, have workarounds, and affect few users.
  • Pri-4: Ponies and icebox. Unfortunate: it's a legitimate issue, but the team never plans to fix this.