Workflow 2.0: Issue Notifications

[jonesphillip]

It’s been a couple of weeks since @dcramer’s initial discussion on Workflow 2.0. As a reminder, our focus is on addressing these two key areas:

• Deliver an experience that ensures a developer is informed about relevant issues after a new release of their software.
• Expand the Issues product to cover additional current and future concerns, including bringing first-class performance issues.

We’ve identified a few paths to those outcomes and we are opening the discussion to the community. This conversation is focused on issue notifications, but we’d love to hear from you on issue grouping and performance issues as well.

Where We Are

Today, Sentry notifies you every time we see a new issue in your projects. This creates a constant stream of notifications that can be noisy and filled with issues that aren’t relevant to you or your team.

Making This Better

Notifications should be timely and relevant, surfacing only issues that matter to each team just as a release manager would surface them. By aligning issue notifications to the developer release workflow and targeting notifications to relevant teams, developers will have the insight they need on their code, as opposed to a barrage of notifications that are not relevant or actionable by them.

To start, we are applying two heuristics to make our notifications timely and relevant:

1. Prioritize issues in the initial phase of the release over latter phases
Developers should care more about issues in the initial stages of a release in which their code has been deployed. Fresh issues require them to take action while issues in the latter stages are usually less time sensitive. We propose notifying developers of issues frequently in the active phase of a release and presenting issues in later phases as part of a single daily digest.

2. Don’t spam me, especially not with repetitive information
Developers will only be notified of issues once - they will not receive multiple notifications for the same issue. We will aggregate issues into digests ensuring that each individual issue doesn’t result in a notification.

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Again, we want to hear from you. Do any of the proposed solutions feel like they'd be helpful? Do you have other ideas we should consider? Please let us know in this conversation.