Improving Issue discoverability and triage clarity

[RDMacLachlan]

Hi everyone,

We're doing a targeted clean-up of our issue labels to streamline triage and make it easier for contributors to find the right home for their work. We will also be providing clear descriptions to any existing area- labels that lack them and update others to ensure they accurately reflect how they should be used.

This cleanup is scheduled for December 5. Please share any comments, questions, or suggestions here; we’ll review everything before taking action.

What we're doing:

• Retiring 17 legacy labels used in this repository.
• Rehoming closed issues that had no remaining tags to appropriate areas or marking them as external when they're out of scope
• Ensuring zero open issues remain under the retired areas; any new work will be triaged under the active, focused labels.
• Adding descriptions to remaining labels that do not have descriptions today.
• Updating descriptions to remaining labels that previous had descriptions to ensure accuracy.

Impact on GitHub community:

• Faster routing and clearer expectations Contributors will spend less time guessing where an issue belongs and more time building, testing and reviewing.
• Better signal for maintainers with fewer, more focused labels, triage queues become more predictable and reviews more timely.
• Smoother collaboration across repositories Consolidating certain concerns under WinUI or marking them external helps align discussions with the right engineering teams.

Next Steps:

• we'll monitor triage velocity and adjust labels as needed
• If you spot an issue that feels misclassified after the change, please comment on the issue and we'll re-route it.

Impacted labels:

Label	Reason for retirement	Comment
area-AppAttach	No new issues; older issues have been moved to external	Previously removed
area-clipboard	UWP APIs are out of scope for Windows App SDK
area-ComCtl32	No issues
area-Composition	Consolidated under microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml GitHub repository
area-DragAndDrop	Consolidated under microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml GitHub repository
area-Fonts	No new issues; older issues have been moved to external	Previously removed
area-Hardware	Out of scope for Windows App SDK
area-Input	Consolidated under microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml GitHub repository
area-Interop	Too generic
area-Media	Out of scope for Windows App SDK
area-Networking	No new issues; older issues have been moved to external
area-OtherFrameworks	No new issues; older issues have been moved to external	Previously removed
area-Printing	Out of scope for Windows App SDK
area-UWP	UWP is out of scope for Windows App SDK
area-Win32	Too generic
area-WinForms	No new issues; older issues have been moved to external	Previously removed
area-Workload	No new issues; older issues have been moved to external	Previously removed

[yoshiask]

Where should out-of-scope reports, such as issues with UWP APIs, be reported if not here?

[RDMacLachlan]

We’re coordinating with partners to clarify where feedback should be filed for issues considered external to Windows App SDK. I’ll update #1876 with status, notes and any new guidance as it becomes available.

[gautambjain]

Request all those managing issues in various Microsoft projects to not close issues for irrational reasons such as:

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has been marked
as requiring author feedback but has not had any activity for 7 days. It will be
closed if no further activity occurs within 7 days of this comment.

This does not prove that the issue is invalid. It may still be a a valid issue. Please tag them as something else. But don't close them.

And the Bot should not close the issue if someone else has responded with some feedback instead of the original author.

[RDMacLachlan]

Thank you for the feedback, how would you and the community like to see these issues handled?

Note, we can re-open issues that were closed this way if someone can help provide the guidance needed, or answer questions the development team has when troubleshooting.

[danielgruethling]

I would appreciate if there was more clarity when an issue is being worked on. A lot of issues feel abandoned, because they just get a label slapped on and then nothing happens for years.

[RDMacLachlan]

This is something we have been thinking about. One idea is:

• Create a new label that shows status ("Pending", "Investing", "In Progress")
• Purge existing assigned individuals from all issues, then have people assign themselves to an issue and own status updates.
• All PRs require a linked Issue.

Would like to get the community input on this or other ideas.

[danielgruethling]

This would be a nice way to show what is being worked on and/or close to being done. I like it

[whiskhub]

This would be optimal! But in the past, there have been often just references to internal tickets and the public GitHub issues were not really maintained. Hopefully this would then also change.

[RDMacLachlan]

The announced changes have been made!