Introducing the Twitter Platform Issue Tracker

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

Today we’re launching our Twitter Platform Issue Tracker. We listened to your feedback and developed a canonical place to host, track and report when issues are resolved. This brand new Issue Tracker deprecates the Google Code Tracker we were previously using.

All Twitter API Issues are now listed on a dev.twitter.com dedicated page, which is directly accessible from the API Health top-bar menu. Issues are organized by Status (Triage, In Progress, or Closed) and you can subscribe to each of these statuses, just like you’d do for discussion categories. For example, you might be interested in receiving an email notification each time an issue is closed.

Note that we’re not only highlighting active “hot” issues - but also recently closed issues - on the API Status page, so you can check the health of the Twitter Platform in one place.

Each API Issue has its own dedicated page, giving you all the details you’ll need:

  • The Issue status, summary, description, latest updates, and an ETA (when we expect to have it solved)
  • Related Documentation pages (i.e. API Resources) that are impacted by this Issue
  • Related Discussion threads where you can discuss this particular Issue, get additional support, and share workarounds
  • A subscription option so you can receive email notifications each time a specific Issue is updated, and also voice your concern (we count, display and use the number of subscriptions as a metric to prioritize bug fixing efforts)

If you’re curious to see what an Issue page looks like, take a look at Issue #2: friendships/show.xml. You’ll notice that we’ve already imported the most pertinent (and actionable) issues from the old Google Code Issue Tracker. Create an issue If there’s a notable bug you think we’ve missed.

Because we maintain edges between Issues, Documentation pages and Discussion threads, we can now display “warnings” on each API Resource affected by an active Issue. The idea with this warning is to prevent developers from losing time wondering why X,Y or Z isn’t working as expected.

With this new Issue Tracker, we’re hoping to give further support and transparency in an effort to help developers build great applications on the Twitter Platform. We hope you like it!