Documentation Team Sweeping Week

Categories: Community, Documentation Created by Lina Wolf
Low shot of floor with a wall. Sweeping brush is leaning to wall.
Photo: Brina Blum / Unsplash.com (CC-0)
The Documentation Team conducts a sweeping week every month, where we try to touch, address and close issues and PRs.

At the start of 2021, the TYPO3 Documentation Team initiated the concept of a "Sweeping Week". This is based on the idea of Kehrwoche where people take turns to ensure the orderliness of common property. 

Maintaining Many Repositories

The Documentation Team maintains 4 core documentation manuals and 12 active tutorials and guides. Additionally there are inactive manuals and guides, and repositories for special interest groups, initiatives and technical purposes. We also manage several TYPO3 extensions. In total, we currently have 76 GitHub repos, each with their own corresponding open issues and pull requests. Some of these get forgotten or can languish because the team is busy working on other areas of documentation.

What Happens During Sweeping Week?

The Sweeping Week is one week every month, where a member of the team dedicates time to the housekeeping of our documentation repositories. 

Activities include:

  • Reviewing open issues
  • Triaging reported problems
  • Chasing up members who said they would investigate something
  • Asking for reviews on open pull requests
  • Merging pull requests that have been approved. 
  • Backporting merged issues

It’s important to note that this person is not responsible for doing the actual work. It is their role to ensure action is taking place.

Effort Is Rewarded

Lina Wolf has committed herself to the task for this year. During the last week of each month she investigates all those "difficult to solve" issues and pull requests that would otherwise pile up. This had brought down the number of open tickets significantly. For example, in January 2021, our largest manual TYPO3 Explained had 76 open issues, many of them laying stale for years. As of April 2021, we are down to 13.

Other Benefits of Keeping a Tidy House

This initiative helps to create a space where members of the TYPO3 community can be confident that reported issues will get addressed and not fall into a black hole. To avoid the possible feeling that it's useless to report problems because they never get fixed anyway.

Even if the Documentation Team doesn't “fix” every problem that is reported, we can at least provide a reason why and explain that it may be part of a larger strategic initiative that we are addressing in another way.

Adopt Sweeping Week In Your Team

We encourage you to employ this idea in your own projects and see how it works for you.

Additional contributors for this article
  • Copy Editor : Felicity Brand
  • Content Publisher : Mathias Bolt Lesniak