Flutter by Google is a fully open-source project, and everyone is welcome to contribute by filing issues or submitting pull requests on GitHub. As Flutter continues to grow in scope and popularity, so does the number of reported issues. Building on our Flutter expertise, Codemagic by Nevercode has helped to keep the issues under control by providing front-line triage of issues in several Flutter repositories as a contractual partner of Google.
What is issue triage about and how does it benefit the Flutter community?
During the past few months, the Codemagic team has been helping the Flutter team with issue triage. This means reviewing and editing the reported issues, assigning labels to determine the affected areas, asking for additional details to facilitate debugging, escalating severe issues to the attention of the Flutter team, closing invalid issues, and so on. In short, Codemagic has been ensuring that all valid issues become actionable for the Flutter team to handle. Read more about how issues work in Flutter repositories.
The issue count in the flutter/flutter repository is impressive, which is not surprising considering that flutter/flutter has made it to the top 10 software repos based on GitHub stars and is the third most popular open-source project on GitHub with 13K contributors. However, the number of open issues has decreased noticeably since our team started doing triage. Two months ago, there were more than 8,000 open issues and a huge backlog of untriaged issues.
Thanks to intensive triage work, all old issues in the repository have passed first triage and a lot of invalid, duplicate or already fixed issues have been closed.
In addition, the Codemagic team is tackling all the new issues coming in. Every day, users report around 20-30 issues. We are the first ones to assess the scope or severeness of potential bugs so we can ensure that all issues get appropriate attention.
Helping out with issue triage enables the Flutter team to focus on fixing bugs, reviewing pull requests and delivering new features faster, which means that Flutter developers get to enjoy a more stable and better performing product.
“We’re excited to continue our partnership with Nevercode. Since featuring Codemagic at Flutter Live in 2018, they’ve been a valued member of the Flutter community, and their work in helping us triage issues on GitHub provides both them and us with increased visibility as to the needs of Flutter users,” says Ray Rischpater, Technical Program Manager at Google.
Being able to work side by side with the Flutter team means a lot to us. “Codemagic and Flutter share the vision of democratizing the app development process and our team has an understanding of the workflow that Flutter developers want. The opportunity to contribute to Flutter is something we are extremely grateful for. We appreciate the trust that Google put into us and are happy that we could deliver,” says Martin Jeret, Nevercode CEO.
From developers to developers
Since the Flutter Live launch event in December 2018, Codemagic CI/CD has grown into a mature and community-favorite developer tool for Flutter projects. We get more and more signups each day and there are over 1,600 members in our Slack community, so we really feel your love! Thanks to the triage project, we also feel your pain.
Helina Ariva, Project Manager for the triage project at Nevercode says: ”Working on this project has given us a better understanding of Flutter and the issues that Flutter developers face. Not only have we been helping the Flutter team with issue triage, we have also helped to ensure that developers’ issues get the attention they deserve. As we grow with Flutter, we have to be experts in understanding the community’s needs beyond CI/CD, and we have learnt a lot on the way.”
In addition to the triage work on Flutter issues and running an open Slack community, we welcome every chance to engage with the Flutter community. “We have been a product for developers from developers since day one. Staying close to the Flutter community is extremely important for us. We often attend Flutter meetups around the world to share knowledge about Flutter and CI/CD and get first-hand feedback,” adds Martin Jeret.
Codemagic is planning another tour to meet Flutter developers in different parts of the world. This time, our travels will take us to Russia in November, the United States and Canada in December, and Poland in January. The exact schedule of the meetups and events that we attend will be soon released on our blog. On December 11, we will definitely be at the Flutter event of the year — Flutter Interact, so save the date and come meet us!
Continuing cooperation
After a successful start, Nevercode and Google have agreed to continue the cooperation also in the future. Being a fast-growing product, we can expect the workload in Flutter repositories to increase. We would like to thank the Flutter community for their active contribution to Flutter, it’s your devotion that makes Flutter thrive. Our team will carry on with front-line triage and investigation of issues, and will eventually move on to pull requests. We are very excited about this cooperation and thrilled to see where this Flutter journey takes us.
