Improving Suggested Assignees

[Dhrumil-Sentry]

Suggested Assignees allow users to easily identify, notify and assign issues to the right team or developer. This helps our users triage their issues faster.

Sentry determines Suggested Assignees for an issue based on three signals:

• Suspect Commits: Sentry identifies the developer that most recently changed the code that triggered this issue
• Ownership Rules: Sentry evaluates rules specified by you to identify the appropriate Sentry team/member based on an issue’s tags, code paths, modules, and URLs
• Code Owners: Sentry evaluates your CODEOWNERS files from GitHub/GitLab to identify the appropriate Sentry team/member for your issue based on its code path.

We want our users to have Suggested Assignees for more issues and we’ve made a number of improvements related to help our users achieve this.

Easily add Ownership rules for your issues

Developers care about particular code paths or transactions in a Sentry issue and often prefer having similar issues assigned to their teams in the future.

You can add ownership rules from your issues itself with the help of contextual suggestions

We have also made it easier to identify what ownership rules apply for a given project.
Go to your Project settings→Ownership rules.
You can search for the relevant CODEOWNERS/Ownership rules that apply to different code file paths,tags etc. for your project

Support for larger CODEOWNERS files

Sentry will soon allow you to add CODEOWNERS files as large as 3Mb (size limit of GitHub CODEOWNERS files). Sentry will be able to identify Suggested Assignees for more issues at our biggest customers as their code bases continue to grow.

Currently, this feature will allow you to upload files as large as 1Mb, and in the next few weeks, we’ll start supporting 3Mb file sizes.

Targeted notifications to Suggested Assignees

Sentry’s alert rule actions allowed you to notify Suggested Assignees identified through CODEOWNERS or Ownership rules but not Suspect Commits.

We have made changes to Issue Alert actions to allow users to notify all Suggested Assignees including authors of Suspect Commits- this will increase the signal value from your notifications by reducing un-targeted notifications even more.

We have also updated Sentry’s default Issue Alert rule Send a notification for new issues to use this new alert action so that our existing customers benefit from these improvements immediately.

Your feedback is much appreciated 🙏

Please let us know how can we continue improving your triage workflow. We’d love to get your opinions about the following:

1. What information helps you to quickly triage and resolve issues?
2. What additional workflow improvements would you like to see in the product?