What is the differentiation from the "performance" keyword which currently is about "Issue degrades performance of applications (...)"? Just the future tense?

Can we wait for this one, or decline it and wait if the need really rises? I agree with @Aklapper on the idea that every tag we add brings an obligation to use it where corresponds, and the more tags we have, the more difficult it is to use them properly.

Interestingly on the list of bugs from Wikidata that were identified as time-bomb, none of them are future performance problems. @Tobi_WMDE_SW can you comment, as this is your idea? Though I would find such a tag useful.

@JanZerebecki, of course performance related issues can be put on the time-bomb list. But time-bombs not necessarily mean they are performance related. So I think the "performance" keyword would not be applicable for this.

Interestingly on the list of bugs from Wikidata that were identified as time-bomb

Where's that list?

In T75893#793373, @Aklapper wrote:

Interestingly on the list of bugs from Wikidata that were identified as time-bomb

Where's that list?

We are started maintaining an internal list of bugs that were considered time-bombs by the developers. It's a document shared inside the team currently. Would be nice to be able to maintain this list also on Phabricator somehow.

Currently on the list:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T74297
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T59666
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T74430
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T69122
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73555

I'm fine creating such a tag if a 2nd development team also sees some value in it and wants to use it too. For the time being (and as we talk about five tickets) I wonder if we could fall back to a summary [prefix].

One intention to create such a tag was that it will hopefully lead to people identify and add more of such tasks once we have a sane process to tag and track them.

One intention to create such a tag was that it will hopefully lead to people identify and add more of such tasks once we have a sane process to tag and track them.

I'd love to see other teams being interested in this and having a basic description in place first how teams will actually query and use such information.
I also hope for a lot of things but some of them never happen unfortunately. :P

Repeating myself, I would love to know if any other team (hence CC'ing Team-Practices to please bring this up and provide expertise) is interested in tagging specific tasks as "time-bombs" too and if that is considered a good idea / practice.

Personally, I feel ambivalent about this. Generally I would recommend proceeding with caution in creating tags in Phabricator, which it sounds like @Aklapper is already doing. In tools like this, there is generally a tendency towards tag-creep (remember BZ?), which on the one hand may not be that big of a deal (especially if you think of tags being particularly useful for individual teams with a shared semantic understanding/workflow/etc for specific tags) but it also introduces noise and confusion to the system.

I certainly do not want to encourage people introducing 'time-bombs' to code - from a team practices perspective, I'd rather work with teams to prevent 'time-bombs' from being introduced in the first place, or encourage a standard of code quality for MW and extensions that does not allow for the inclusion of 'time-bombs'. However, I am imagining this tag being used similarly to something like @FIXME in code comments.

Maybe this is a question for the architects ;)

Right. We don't want to encourage timebombs. But we do have them. And being able to tag them would help a lot.

There's also a Technical-Debt tag that could be used (was T2700: Code quality issues (tracking) [DO NOT USE: Superseded by #Technical-Debt]. before)

Personally I just don't see enough difference (and need to differentiate) from Technical-Debt here.

Wikidata currently has 7 tickets (open or closed) with a Technical-Debt tag. That number sounds small enough enough to make Wikidata just use Technical-Debt a bit more often and also cover time bomb issues by it?