# Triaging at Scale: How the Gradle Team Handles Issues and Pull Requests

DevFeed: [Triaging at Scale: How the Gradle Team Handles Issues and Pull Requests](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/triaging-at-scale-how-the-gradle-team-handles-issues-and-pull-requests-24699.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.gradle.org/triaging-gradle-github-issues>)

Author: Vlad Chesnokov

Published: 2026-07-16T04:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The Gradle Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-gradle-blog.md>)

Topics: [Gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gradle.md>), [issue tracker](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/issue-tracker.md>), [GitHub](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github.md>), [Automation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/automation.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pull-requests.md>)

Tags: [automation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automation.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bug.md>), [documentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/documentation.md>), [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gradle.md>), [issue-tracker](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/issue-tracker.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pull-requests.md>), [usability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/usability.md>)

## AI overview

The Gradle team explains how it triages GitHub issues and pull requests at scale. The article describes lessons from using and then removing stale-issue automation, the role of human review, and how issue reports help identify bugs, documentation gaps, and usability problems.

## Source excerpt

Communities are at the heart of Gradle's success. Without their involvement, the build tool would not have the extensive feature set and wide use it has. And using the plural form is no mistake! While the user community is the largest, we also have a community of plugin authors that contribute to extending the capabilities of Gradle. A significant part of interactions between the Gradle team and those communities occurs via feature requests and bug reports using GitHub's issue tracker. Over the past years, we have improved how we handle those reports. We can now give them the attention they deserve and use them to help us improve the build tool across releases. In this post, we'll walk through how triage works today, the changes that got us here, and what you can do to help us help you when you report an issue. An iterative process Back in 2020, we introduced a stale bot to tackle our growing backlog of stale issues. Once it started closing issues, the community feedback was quick to arrive. The biggest complaint was that issues were closed automatically as stale, without a human from the engineering team ever weighing in. So we walked the automation back, step by step. First, we changed the stale bot to no longer close issues, only mark them stale and leave them open for the team to review. Then we reviewed all open issues carrying that label. With the backlog under control, we removed the stale bot for issues altogether. Later, we even re-triaged the closed stale issues that had at least one vote. Most turned out to be duplicates or already fixed. Today, no automation can silently close an issue. What's more, we don't miss any comments under closed issues: if somebody comments on a closed issue, it will be re-triaged. There are still around a thousand issues in our main repository closed by the stale bot. We don't plan to re-triage them, assuming they are obsolete. If the stale bot closed an issue you still care about, just leave a comment and we'll take another l