On 06/24/15 at 02:38pm, Nikola Đipanov wrote:
On 06/24/2015 01:42 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 11:28:59AM +0100, Nikola Đipanov wrote:
Hey Nova,
I'll cut to the chase and keep this email short for brevity and clarity:
Specs don't work! They do nothing to facilitate good design happening,
if anything they prevent it. The process layered on top with only a
minority (!) of cores being able to approve them, yet they are a prereq
of getting any work done, makes sure that the absolute minimum that
people can get away with will be proposed. This in turn goes and
guarantees that no good design collaboration will happen. To add insult
to injury, Gerrit and our spec template are a horrible tool for
discussing design. Also the spec format itself works for only a small
subset of design problems Nova development is faced with.
I'd like to see some actual evidence to backup a sweeping statement
as "Specs dont work. They do nothing to facilitate good design happening,
if anything they prevent it."
Comparing Nova today, with Nova before specs were introduced, I think
that specs have had a massive positive impact on the amount of good
design and critique that is happening.
Before specs, the average blueprint had no more than 3 lines of text
in its description. Occassionally a blueprint would link to a wiki
page or google doc with some design information, but that was very
much the exception.
When I was reviewing features in Nova before specs came along, I spent
alot of time just trying to figure out what on earth the code was
actually attempting to address, because there was rarely any statement
of the problem being addressed, or any explanation of the design that
motivated the code. This made life hard for reviewers trying to figure
out if the code was acceptable to merge. It is pretty bad for contributors
trying to implement new features too, as they could spend weeks or months
writing and submitting code, only to be rejected at the end because the
(lack of any design discussions) meant they missed some aspect of the
problem which in turn meant all their work was in vain. That was a collosal
waste of everyone's time and resulted in some of the very horrible code
impl decisions we're still living with today.
Yes there are good reasons to have a place to discuss implementation
before doing it, especially if you are new to the project.
This has been a huge boon. And I don't think the benefits are realized
only for developers new to the project.
It seems to me that the challenge going forward is how to keep this
benefit while reducing/eliminating some of the drawbacks. But dropping
specs without a replacement would eliminate both the benefit and the
drawbacks.
The behemoth we have now is not that. It's miles away as you point out
below.
That's only a subset of problems. Some more, you ask? OK. No clear
guidelines as to what needs a spec, that defaults to "everything does".
And spec being the absolute worst way to judge the validity of some of
the things that do require them.
Examples of the above are everywhere if you care to look for them but
some that I've hit _this week_ are [1] (spec for a quick and dirty fix?!
really?!) [2] (spec stuck waiting for a single person to comment
something that is an implementation detail, and to make matter worse the
spec is for a bug fix) [3] (see how ill suited the format is for a
discussion + complaints about grammar and spelling instead of actual
point being made).
Nova's problem is not that it's big, it's that it's big _and_ tightly
coupled. This means no one can be trusted to navigate the mess
successfully, so we add the process to stop them. What we should be
doing is fixing the mess, and the very process is preventing that.
Don't take my word for it - ask the Gantt subteam who have been trying
to figure out the scheduler interface for almost 4 cycles now. Folks
doing Cells might have a comment on this too.
The good news is that we have a lot of stuff in place already to help us
reduce this massive coupling of everything. We have versioned objects,
we have versioned RPC. Our internal APIs are terrible, and provide no
isolation, but we have the means to iterate and figure it out.
I don't expect this process issues will get solved quickly, If it were
up to me I'd drop the whole thing, but I understand that it's not how
it's done.
I do hope this makes people think, discuss and move things into the
direction of facilitating quality software development instead of
outright preventing it. I'll follow up with some ideas on how to go
forward once a few people have commented back.
I will agree that the specs process has a number of flaws - in particular
I think we've treated it as too much of a rigid process resulting it in
being very beurocractic. In particular I think are missing an ability to
be pragmmatic in decisions about the level of design required and whether
specs are required. The idea of allowing blueprints without specs in
some cases was an attempt to address this, but I don't feel it has been
very successful - there is still too much stuff being forced through
the specs process unncessarily imho.
I haven't seen much, really anything, that's been forced through
unnecessarily but I have seen a number of specs written for things that
were petitioning for a specless blueprint. I'm not sure why that's
done, but perhaps it comes down to a fear of missing the spec deadline
and being blocked for a cycle.
I've repeatedly stated that the fact that we created an even smaller
clique of people to approve specs (nova-drivers which is a tiny subset
of the already faaaar too small nova-core) is madness, as it creates
an even worse review burden on them, and thus worsens the bottleneck
than we already have.
I agree that the number of people who can approve specs is too small at
the moment. But relatively few people are actually reviewing specs so
building trust here is difficult. And since I'm not seeing the entirety
of nova-core doing spec reviews I don't think we should just give that
entire group +2 ability on specs.
In reviewing specs, we also often get into far too much detail about
the actual implementation, which is really counterproductive. eg when
get down to bikeshedding about the names of classes, types of object
attributes, and so forth, it is really insane. That level of detail
and bikesheeding belongs in the code review, not the design for the
most part.
Totally agree here. The spec shouldn't constrain an implementation
except in broad strokes, or places that are difficult to change after
the fact. I have asked people to remove implementation details from a
spec for that reason. But I have been asked to add details about
database indexes when adding a new table, which I think is fair in order
to avoid a second migration later.
Specs are also inflexible when it comes to dealing with features that
cross multiple projects, because we silo'd spec reviews against the
individual projects. This is sub-optimal, but ultimately not a show
stopper.
I also think the way we couple spec approval & reviews to the dev
cycles is counterproductive. We should be willing to accept and
review specs at any point in any cycle, and once approved they should
remain valid for a prolonged period of time - not require us to go
through re-review every new dev cycle as again that's just creating
extra burden. We should of course though reserve the right to unapprove
specs if circumstances change, invlidating the design for the previous
approval.
I agree with this. Though I do think we need to be realistic and say
that spec reviews are a lower priority in later parts of a cycle. As a
reviewer I like the spec freeze and not getting pinged for spec reviews
constantly, but it is a very big blocker for people whose spec doesn't
get approved in a cycle. I think we need a more middle ground.
In short specs are far from perfect, but to say specs don't solve/help
anything todo with design in nova is really ignoring our history from
before the time specs existed. We must continue to improve our process
overall the biggest thing we lost IMHO is agility and pragmatism in
our decision making - I think we can regain that without throwing away
the specs idea entirely.
+1
Basically I agree with everything above.
I urge people to reply to this instead of my original email as the
writing is more detailed and balanced.
Thanks Daniel!
N.
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