[New Process Improvement Need]: Software Repository Hygiene

Checked for duplicates

Yes - I've already checked

Category

Governance

Describe the need

Once a software project gets rolling, there are aspects important to maintaining the software repository that can aid the health and maintenance of the project. What we need is a clear set of guidelines / checklists for project maintainers to be cognizant of at a recurring interval - to ensure the software repository is following best practices.

Some ideas on hygiene topics:

• If the project hasn't been updated in a year or more, it should consider being archived and / or deprecated.
• Responding to pull requests in a timely fashion. Contributors are much less likely to consider helping your project if their pull requests stay ignored for months.
• Responding to issue ticket conversations / triaging tickets in a timely fashion, including ensuring issue tickets are properly labeled and have assigned projects / milestones / etc. Same reason as above.
• Responding to discussions in a timely fashion. Same reason as above.
• Ensuring issue tickets are properly labeled and have assigned projects / milestones / etc.
• Cleaning out old / merged branches. A giant list of branches can be very confusing to contributors.
• Ensuring documentation / README has been updated as the software evolves.