The more you understand an issue the better equipped you’ll be to solve it. When I was creating issues in GitHub for Score Keeper, something about the process felt a bit lacking. A developer needs specific details and the system wasn’t working to deliver them.

Even the issues I’d submitted lacked the detail for someone (other than me) to address the problems outlined. I’d previously contributed to Gutenberg, and I noticed the team had templates for recording issues. As it turns out, this is a standard feature in GitHub.

To improve my practice, I’ve enabled the two default templates provided by GitHub. The first is for reporting bugs like “Max score change doesn’t affect victory formatting” and the second for requesting new features like “Interface needs styling”.

In time I’ll be updating the current issues submitted to conform to the templates. Any new issue will get the right template depending on its nature. A bug will get one template, while a feature request will get another.

Any tool that can improve communication like this is worth its weight in gold.