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Useful scripts for managing GitHub issues

If GitHub issues play an important role in the way you manage projects, then some of these scripts might be of use to you.

All of them rely on having a ~/.github-oauth-token.json file with your GitHub OAuth token, like:

{"token": "your github oauth access token here"}

You can generate such a token from https://github.com/settings/tokens/new

Remote collaborative estimation in a Google Spreadsheet

make-estimation-spreadsheet.py

At work we do estimation of the difficulty of issues in a Google Spreadsheet, where each developer has their own sheet within the spreadsheet. They put in a score (and optionally some notes) beside each of the open unestimated issues without looking at anyone else's sheet. Then we get together on a video call and all switch to the 'Consensus' sheet in the spreadsheet and discuss any issues where we've made different estimates.

The procedure for doing this is to run a command like:

./make-estimation-spreadsheet.py mysociety/pombola mark duncan liz

The first parameter is the name of the GitHub repository and the remaining parameters are names of the developers who'll be taking part in the estimation exercise.

That command will generate a file called estimates.xls.

Unfortunately, just uploading this to Google Docs via the obvious way doesn't seem to work; instead, you need to create an empty Google Spreadsheet first, and then go to "File > Import ...", select the 'Upload' tab, select the estimates.xls file, and then select "Replace spreadsheet".

Then share that spreadsheet with your fellow developers, ideally giving them the URL for their personal sheet within the spreadsheet.

(Incidentally, the scoring system we use for estimation of difficulty of issues is Mazz Mosley's, as described by Anna Shipman which is based on how much you already know about how to do it rather than estimating hours, say.)

set-estimates.py

Once you've arrived at a consensus, you'll want to add those estimates to the GitHub issues as labels of the form Difficulty 3, Difficulty 5, etc. There's another script in this repository to help with this, called set-estimates.py.

First, download just the 'Consensus' sheet of your estimation spreadsheet in Google Docs as a CSV file. You can do that by switching to that sheet and going to "File > Download > Comma-separated values".

Then you can give the downloaded file as the second parameter to the script - the first should be the name of the repository on GitHub, e.g.

./set-estimates.py mysociety/pombola "Pombola estimation - Consensus.csv"

Create a PDF file of every open issue in a respository

get-pdfs-of-issues.py

If you run this script against a repository, e.g. with:

./get-pdfs-of-issues.py mysociety/yournextrepresentative

... it's make a pdfs subdirectory and generate one PDF in there for each open issue in the repository. We found this useful for printing out every open issue in a repository to triage them.

Note that pandoc needs a lot of texlive to be installed for it to generate PDFs - I needed to install the following:

sudo apt-get install \
    texlive-fonts-recommended \
    texlive-latex-base \
    texlive-latex-extra \
    texlive-latex-recommended \
    texlive-xetex

Of course, some of these PDFs may be more than one page. To print out just the first page of each, 4 to an A4 side, I did this:

cd pdfs
for i in *.pdf; do pdftk $i cat 1-1 output ${i%.pdf}-first-page.pdf; done
pdftk *-first-page.pdf cat output all-first-pages.pdf
pdfnup --nup 2x2 --outfile all-first-pages-4up.pdf --no-landscape all-first-pages.pdf

(pdftk is in the Debian package of the same name, and pdfnup is from texlive-extra-utils.)

If you use Mac OS, then apparently this may be helpful as help on how to combine and print out the PDFs: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/ht4075 (Thanks to Tom Steinberg for that suggestion.)

Spreadsheets for calculating sprint velocity / performance

When we first started estimating, I was interested in how the points we estimated related to the amount of time in a sprint, so it was helpful to generate CSV files with details of the issues that were in each sprint (in the sense of being associated with the milestone representing the sprint in GitHub issues) and any other issues that were closed over the course of the sprint.

This assumes that the following things are true:

  • You use labels for difficulty points as above (i.e. of the form Difficulty N_)
  • You have milestones that represent each sprint, with a title that begins with 'Sprint'
  • Each milestone has a due date set in GitHub issues for the end of the sprint.

Then, supposing you have two weeks sprints, you can run:

./make-sprint-milestone-spreadsheets.py mysociety/pombola 14

That should generate one CSV file for each sprint milestone in GitHub issues.

Mark Longair mhl@pobox.com