Good first issues

Good first issues should roughly meet the following criteria:

• Issues should take no longer than two or three days for someone new to our code base.
  • Remember that people still need to set up the development environment, etc. If you, an experienced contributor, can do the entire task in under an hour, that's probably a good candidate.
• Issues are self-contained, non-controversial issues with a clear approach.
  • Sometimes I'll do 50-80% of the task myself just to make sure there are no unexpected roadblocks or pitfalls that a new contributor would hit. (Or call them out in the issue description if they can be safely skipped over)
• Issues do not require any special permissions in order to test the contribution or to fix the task. Anyone should be able to reproduce.
  • We are targeting contributors that don't have SecureDrop hardware or probably the resources to set up a staging environment. Ideally it is all testable in the dev environment/CI.
• Issues should be well-described with pointers to help an absolute newcomer (and preferably don't leave questions).

You should add the following to the top of a good first issue:

*This is a good first issue for new contributors to take on, if you have any questions, please ask on the task or in our [Gitter room](https://gitter.im/freedomofpress/securedrop)!*

External resources:

• Why Good-First-Bugs often aren't
• Wikimedia's good-first-task instructions, from which most of this is copied from (CC-BY-SA 3.0)