Issuesterms

Issuesterms is a proposed standardized glossary and taxonomy for issue tracking used by software development teams and service desks. It provides a controlled set of terms and relationships designed to reduce ambiguity when describing, labeling, and reporting on issues across tools and projects.

The standard typically organizes terms into several axes, including IssueType (Bug, Task, Feature, Improvement), Status (Open, In Progress, Resolved, Closed, Reopened), Priority (Low, Medium, High, Critical), and Severity (Blocker, Critical, Major, Minor). Additional categories cover Resolution (Fixed, Won't Fix, Duplicate, Incomplete, Not Reproducible), Components or Modules, Versions or Milestones, Tags/Labels, and Assignee roles. This framework supports consistent categorization, filtering, and analytics.

Governance usually involves a community or standards body responsible for maintaining the vocabulary, publishing versioned releases, and providing deprecation policies. Compatibility with major issue trackers is a common goal, often achieved through mappings or adapters to tools such as Jira, GitHub Issues, and GitLab.

Implementation commonly uses machine-readable representations such as YAML or JSON, enabling automation for labeling, routing, reporting, and synchronization across systems. Organizations can adopt issuesterms gradually, mapping their existing terms to the standard and extending it for domain-specific needs.

Benefits include improved searchability, cross-project reporting, streamlined automation, and clearer onboarding for new contributors. Potential limitations involve the overhead of governance, the risk of rigidity, and the need for ongoing maintenance to reflect evolving workflows and tools.

Example mappings can be simple key-value representations, such as type: Bug, status: Open, priority: High, component: UI, version: v2.1.