Triaging Issues

Bug reports

Triaging issues is a great way to help maintain the health of our repo, and help contributors and engineers know what they should work on. All new bug reports are created with the Issue needs review label, so sorting by issues that have that label is a great way to get started.

When looking at a new issue, these are the steps to follow:

• Is this a valid bug report?
  • If this is a question about Expo, then it belongs on our forums - but feel free to answer it if you know the answer!
  • If this is a feature request, then it belongs on our canny
  • If this is a general programming question, then it belongs on Stack Overflow
• Does the issue contain a minimal, reproducible example? (It's usually best for repros to take the form of a snack)
  • If it does not contain any repro or even steps to repro, then it might be best to close the issue, but use your best judgement here. (There are very few cases where a repro isn't necessary)
  • If it does contain a repro, test it and make sure it exhibits the bugged behavior. If it doesn't, add the Requesting changes to issue label, and add a comment asking for additional information on reproducing.
• Add Github labels based on the issue description:
  • Include the label android runtime, ios runtime, or platform: web if it's specific to one particular platform
  • Add the module name label (for example, issues pertaining to expo-camera should have the Camera label)
  • If the issue is specific to the bare workflow, add the Bare workflow label
  • Is there any more information the author can provide? This might be SDK version, package version, device information, or anything else you think might help to debug. If this is the case, add the Requesting changes to issue label and ask for what you think it needs
• Assign the appropriate team member, if applicable. This is made much easier by our codeowners file, which lists the owner of each package.
• Remove the Issue needs review label (thanks for triaging this issue! 🙏 You rock!)

Note: It can be really useful to go through these steps (at least in your head) when creating issues in expo/expo, as well!

Editing issues

Ideally, issue authors should take care of this, but sometimes they forget. In that case, there are a number of improvements you can make to a bug report that take a small amount of effort, but make a big difference in the end:

• Format the issue nicely, including surrounding any code with backticks (```)
• Chang the title of the issue to clearly state the bug
• Add labels, as stated above
• Provide a minimal, reproducible example