On 09/11/2014 07:32 AM, Eoghan Glynn wrote:
As you all know, there has recently been several very active discussions
around how to improve assorted aspects of our development process. One idea
that was brought up is to come up with a list of cycle goals/project
priorities for Kilo [0].
To that end, I would like to propose an exercise as discussed in the TC
meeting yesterday [1]:
Have anyone interested (especially TC members) come up with a list of what
they think the project wide Kilo cycle goals should be and post them on this
thread ...
Here's my list of high-level cycle goals, for consideration ...
1. Address our usability debts
With some justification, we've been saddled with the perception
of not caring enough about the plight of users and operators. The
frustrating thing is that much of this is very fixable, *if* we take
time out from the headlong rush to add features. Achievable things
like documentation completeness, API consistency, CLI intuitiveness,
logging standardization, would all go a long way here.
These things are of course all not beyond the wit of man, but we
need to take the time out to actually do them. This may involve
a milestone, or even longer, where we accept that the rate of
feature addition will be deliberately slowed down.
2. Address the drags on our development velocity
Despite the Trojan efforts of the QA team, the periodic brownouts
in the gate are having a serious impact on our velocity. Over the
past few cycles, we've seen the turnaround time for patch check/
verification spike up unacceptably long multiple times, mostly
around the milestones.
Whatever we can do to smoothen out these spikes, whether it be
moving much of the Tempest coverage into the project trees, or
switching focus onto post-merge verification as suggested by
Sean on this thread, or even considering some more left-field
approaches such as staggered milestones, we need to grasp this
nettle as a matter of urgency.
Further back in the pipeline, the effort required to actually get
something shepherded through review is steadily growing. To the
point that we need to consider some radical approaches that
retain the best of our self-organizing model, while setting more
reasonable & reliable expectations for patch authors, and making
it more likely that narrow domain expertise is available to review
their contributions in timely way. For the larger projects, this
is likely to mean something different (along the lines of splits
or sub-domains) than it does for the smaller projects.
3. Address the long-running "what's in and what's out" questions
The way some of the discussions about integration and incubation
played out this cycle have made me sad. Not all of these discussions
have been fully supported by the facts on the ground IMO. And not
all of the issues that have been held up as justifications for
whatever course of exclusion or inclusion would IMO actually be
solved in that way.
I think we need to move the discussion around a new concept of
layering, or redefining what it means to be "in the tent", to a
more constructive and collaborative place than heretofore.
4. Address the fuzziness in cross-service interactions
In a semi-organic way, we've gone and built ourselves a big ol'
service-oriented architecture. But without necessarily always
following the strong contracts, loose coupling, discoverability,
and autonomy that a SOA approach implies.
We need to take the time to go back and pay down some of the debt
that has accreted over multiple cycles around these these
cross-service interactions. The most pressing of these would
include finally biting the bullet on the oft-proposed but never
delivered-upon notion of stabilizing notifications behind a
well-defined contract. Also, the more recently advocated notions
of moving away from coarse-grained versioning of the inter-service
APIs, and supporting better introspection and discovery of
capabilities.
+1
IMO, almost all of the other ills discussed recently derive from this
single failure.
-David
by end of day Wednesday, September 10th.
Oh, yeah, and impose fewer arbitrary deadlines ;)
Cheers,
Eoghan
After which time we can
begin discussing the results.
The goal of this exercise is to help us see if our individual world views
align with the greater community, and to get the ball rolling on a larger
discussion of where as a project we should be focusing more time.
best,
Joe Gordon
[0]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-August/041929.html
[1]
http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2014/tc.2014-09-02-20.04.log.html
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