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One of the issues that the Nova team has definitely hit is Blueprint
overload. At some point there were over 150 blueprints. Many of them
were a single sentence.

The results of this have been that design review today is typically not
happening on Blueprint approval, but is instead happening once the code
shows up in the code review. So -1s and -2s on code review are a mix of
design and code review. A big part of which is that design was never in
any way sufficiently reviewed before the code started.

In today's Nova meeting a new thought occurred. We already have Gerrit
which is good for reviewing things. It gives you detailed commenting
abilities, voting, and history. Instead of attempting (and usually
failing) on doing blueprint review in launchpad (or launchpad + an
etherpad, or launchpad + a wiki page) we could do something like follows:

1. create bad blueprint
2. create gerrit review with detailed proposal on the blueprint
3. iterate in gerrit working towards blueprint approval
4. once approved copy back the approved text into the blueprint (which
should now be sufficiently detailed)

Basically blueprints would get design review, and we'd be pretty sure we
liked the approach before the blueprint is approved. This would
hopefully reduce the late design review in the code reviews that's
happening a lot now.

There are plenty of niggly details that would be need to be worked out

 * what's the basic text / template format of the design to be reviewed
(probably want a base template for folks to just keep things consistent).
 * is this happening in the nova tree (somewhere in docs/ - NEP (Nova
Enhancement Proposals), or is it happening in a separate gerrit tree.
 * are there timelines for blueprint approval in a cycle? after which
point, we don't review any new items.

Anyway, plenty of details to be sorted. However we should figure out if
the big idea has support before we sort out the details on this one.

Launchpad blueprints will still be used for tracking once things are
approved, but this will give us a standard way to iterate on that
content and get to agreement on approach.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
Samsung Research America
sean at dague.net / sean.dague at samsung.com
http://dague.net

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