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The Problem

I hate backlogs. It is a mystery to me that I’ve worked in tech for over a decade because there is no such thing as a week where you get to check “done” on every Jira task assigned to you. You will never shut your laptop down at the end of a work week and say to yourself, “I have solved all the problems!” It just isn’t going to happen.

Backlogs will happen for a variety of reasons. More urgent issues come up and rightly so you need to re-prioritize what you are focusing on. The important thing is not to forget about that backlog indefinitely. In the past couple of years, the Community and Product Teams have been working really hard to minimize backlogs and address ones that have pre-dated many of us. In my first week at Stack Overflow, I participated in a status-review tag smash to work through the posts that had gone through the new escalation process established in 2020 that had gone without a response.

However, there were a number of posts across the various Meta sites on the platform that predated the new escalation process, so they’ve been sitting in limbo for years. It was a goal of mine to make sure that backlog was tackled.

The Solution

Last quarter, several of the Product Managers and Community Managers split up and reviewed the 196 issues across the Meta sites on SE that have been sitting in since 2020 or earlier. The teams put our heads together to determine what items had been previously resolved, which were now moot (i.e. the ones related to Jobs or some other feature that has since been sunset), which items we aren’t able to tackle in the near future, and which ones we will be.

Throughout the past few weeks several Community Managers have been hard at work updating the statuses and triaging the handful of items that we’re keeping in for the moment because we need to dig a little deeper to determine the solution and if it’s something we can take on in an upcoming quarter or not. We’ll be commenting and updating the status on those items in the near future.

What’s Next?

Getting rid of this backlog is a huge step towards improving our response rate on items each quarter. Having a backlog over the years is part of the reason that we’ve set two targets every quarter, one for the current period and one for previous periods. Moving forward, beginning next quarter we are going to focus on a single target number, and my goal is for us to gradually increase that target so that we are responding to items at a higher rate and in a more timely manner than we’ve been able to in the past.

Blasting through these remaining legacy items was a team effort. Kudos and major thanks to tanj92, Brendan, jkm, Catija, JNat, Slate, SpencerG, and V2Blast. By updating these posts, everyone has transparency in what’s getting picked up by the Community and Product teams. This was our ultimate goal in taking on this initiative.

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  • 32
    In some cases, the status-review was just removed from questions, without adding other status tag or otherwise explaining. What does it mean? Can such questions be marked for review again at some point, to "restart" the process?
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 15:57
  • Also, in the credits you forgot Juice, he also took part as far as I can see. :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 16:06
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    Juice didn't take part in the smash per se — it's just that a few of the items that were under his purview were routed into our ticketing system, and sent his way, and he responded promptly. Thanks are due, all the same, though!
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 16:35
  • "I hate backlogs." You should join us folks in the Tavern on the Meta! :D (see the room description)
    – starball
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 1:05
  • 2
    Now that the backlog is getting cleared, maybe we can get more questions to actually receive [status-review] instead of just languishing forever!
    – miken32
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 17:41

2 Answers 2

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Thanks to Glorfindel's answer, we were able to find out that indeed a few posts missed this smash. For all of these, the root cause was: I made a mistake (^_^;)

A good chunk of posts that should've been addressed by the smash ended up not getting our attention. I've re-generated the list, went through a bunch this morning whose relevance I could assess on my own and handled those.

That leaves 32 issues to be handled. I'll be working with the relevant PMs to look through those, and essentially go through the process they should've gone through: is the tag still relevant, should they be retagged, etc.

Worth noting, also, that 14 posts Glorfindel's query doesn't consider "resolved" were handled as per the scope of this smash: they were edited, so they got bumped into our ticketing system, and can undergo the normal triage process. As per the regular escalation process, they were not "responded" to, and thus not "handled," but they went through the review process this smash envisioned: a check for the pertinency of the tag.

Apologies for the confusion, and thank you to Glorfindel for catching on to this! ^_^

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  • 6
    Great news, I'll update my post next Sunday and no doubt it will look much better :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 19:18
  • 13
    @Glorfindel thank you again for flagging. I'd also like to acknowledge the hard work JNat put into correcting this today. They handled all of the ones that didn't need support from product on their own and swooped into make sure the other ones aren't forgotten. JNat is a true community champion.
    – Rosie StaffMod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 19:22
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    @JNat just to be sure (I was planning to update my SEDE query): edits like this cause a question marked [status-review] before 2020-03-16 to end up in your ticketing system? How about answers, or edits to answers (and other things that may bump a question)?
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 20, 2023 at 9:45
  • 1
    Anything that bumps the question should cause it to get sent to our ticketing system, @Glorfindel . Our current system looks at the network-wide feed for posts tagged [status-review], with the "active" sort. Post like the one you used as an example do get sent to our system (I confirmed that one specifically is there).
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 10:53
  • 1
    Thank you - I've updated my answer; it could be that 33 questions are still waiting to be smashed.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 12:44
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I'm happy to see progress, but I just want to make sure the numbers are right ... Here is a SEDE query which lists all questions

The last column checks whether there has been any activity on the question since 2020-03-16, which bumps it into the ticketing system. That might have been done during the ticket smash, but also by earlier activity to the question in, say, 2021. (It's hard to account for those - only the last activity date is stored in the Posts table.)

Note that SEDE is updated only once a week, on Sunday morning, so it will miss some work done this week. Right now (February 21st), the query lists 193 questions (close enough to the 196 mentioned in the question), of which

  • 165 have been retagged
  • 19 are still in but (should) have a ticket
  • 9 are still in but will probably not have a ticket

After a couple of iterations, I'm satisfied that's only a handful of questions still to be reviewed. Thanks a lot for your work!

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  • 4
    "only 123 questions have been 'resolved'" - this "only" is great. And they don't mean they handled them all, it is still work in progress.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 16:28
  • 4
    What counts as "resolved" in the scope of this query?
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 16:37
  • 4
    @Shadow the question gave me the impression they have all been reviewed, but the numbers don't add up for me yet. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with any kind of progress :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 17:00
  • 2
    @JNat sorry, I changed my query halfway writing the answer - I meant questions where the status-review tag has been removed.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 17:00
  • Well it says "reviewed the 196 issues across the Meta sites", but it doesn't mean they made a decision about all of them, some probably were marked internally as "still need further review" and left in review, and those are the "missing" items.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 17:36
  • 4
    @ShadowWizardChasingStars sure, the question mentions triaging the handful of items that we’re keeping in status-review for the moment and my answer reflects that. I have big hands but 50 is way more than a handful for me :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 17:42
  • 3
    From looking at our internal records, there's less than 20 posts that kept the tag, @Glorfindel. I don't have the time to go over your query results and find the discrepancy at this moment, but from a random selection of a handful of not "resolved" ones only yielded post-process posts (meaning posts tagged [status-review] after the process for escalation was introduced in March 2020), and this smash was only to clean up all the pre-process [status-review]'d posts.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 19:50
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    If you wanna get more accurate results, the "start date" for the process is March 16, 2020.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 19:50
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    @Glorfindel The third link is one that I edited specifically to get it added to the board and I don't have a status update for it other than making sure it's been sent to the correct team (Trust & Safety), which it has :D. Edits to the question make it eligible for our tooling to pick it up, so that might be a consideration - whether it has status-review but the question was edited within the last few months.
    – Catija
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 21:16
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    I removed the status-review tag from question 2, as mobile web is no longer live.
    – Catija
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 21:20
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    It really wasn't my intention, but you're welcome to use it as a checklist for questions you might have missed :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 7:56
  • 3
    It might skew what's considered "resolved" in the context of this query, @Mast , but on the other hand having it be re-[status-review]'d means it is now being accounted for as a part of the regular process for this quarter. So maybe "done" in the context of the smash, but might be account for as "not done" in the context of the process when we generate stats for Jan-Mar 2023.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 10:31
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    The query was actually immensely helpful, @Glorfindel — I did a manual pass through all items now, and there is indeed a discrepancy. More updates later.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 12:23
  • 2
    @JNat great, thanks for the feedback!
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 12:32
  • 5
    The promised update.
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Feb 15, 2023 at 19:11

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