> It sounds like your issue tracker is a part time documentation repository.
Yeah, it's exactly that.
I'm planning to write more about this. Basically I've started thinking of issues as "temporaral documentation" - documentation with an attached timestamp that was known to be accurate only at the point when it was written.
A challenge with regular documentation is that when you first write it you are making a commitment to keep it up-to-date in the future. A project with thousands of pages of outdated documentation isn't much better than a project with no documentation at all (it might even be worse).
But a project with thousands of pages of timestamped issue comments feels different to me: there's no expectation that those will be updated in the future, but they still offer enormous value in terms of capturing the decisions that lead to the present day.
So yes: I do consider my issues as a form of documentation. They're not a replacement for traditional documentation, but they're a valuable extension to it.
That makes sense, although I think I would prefer to put pull requests in the "temporaral documentation" category rather than issues. But it sounds like your process is working well.
Yeah, it's exactly that.
I'm planning to write more about this. Basically I've started thinking of issues as "temporaral documentation" - documentation with an attached timestamp that was known to be accurate only at the point when it was written.
A challenge with regular documentation is that when you first write it you are making a commitment to keep it up-to-date in the future. A project with thousands of pages of outdated documentation isn't much better than a project with no documentation at all (it might even be worse).
But a project with thousands of pages of timestamped issue comments feels different to me: there's no expectation that those will be updated in the future, but they still offer enormous value in terms of capturing the decisions that lead to the present day.
So yes: I do consider my issues as a form of documentation. They're not a replacement for traditional documentation, but they're a valuable extension to it.