Open Stack

Greetings,

At the Tokyo summit, we discussed OpenStack's development themes in a
cross-project session. In this session a group of folks started discussing what
topics the overall community could focus on as a shared effort. One of the
things that was raised during this session is the need of having cycles to
stabilize projects. This was brought up by Robert Collins again in a meeting[0]
the TC had right after the summit and no much has been done ever since.

Now, "stabilization Cycles" are easy to dream about but really hard to do and
enforce. Nonetheless, they are still worth a try or, at the very least, a
thought. I'll try to go through some of the issues and benefits a stabilization
cycle could bring but bear in mind that the lists below are not exhaustive. In
fact, I'd love for other folks to chime in and help building a case in favor or
against this.

Negative(?) effects
===================

- Project won't get new features for a period of time Economic impact on
  developers(?)
- It was mentioned that some folks receive bonuses for landed features
- Economic impact on companies/market because no new features were added (?)
- (?)

Positive effects
================

- Focus on bug fixing
- Reduce review backlog
- Refactor *existing* code/features with cleanups
- Focus on multi-cycle features (if any) and complete those
- (?)

A stabilization cycle, as it was also discussed in the aforementioned
meeting[0], doesn't need to be all or nothing. For instance, it should be
perfectly fine for a project to say that a project would dedicate 50% of the
cycle to stabilization and the rest to complete some pending features. Moreover,
each project is free to choose when/if a stabilization cycle would be good for
it or not.

For example, the Glance team is currently working on refactoring the image
import workflow. This is a long term effort that will require at least 2 cycles
to be completed. Furthermore, it's very likely these changes will introduce bugs
and that will require further work. If the Glance team would decide (this is not
an actual proposal... yet :) to use Newton as a stabilization cycle, the team
would be able to focus all its forces on fixing those bugs, completing the
feature and tackling other, long-term, pending issues. In the case of Glance,
this would impact *only glance* and not other projects under the Glance team
umbrella like glanceclient and glance_store. In fact, this would be a perfect
time for the glance team to dedicate time to improving glanceclient and catch up
with the server side latest changes.

So, the above sounds quite vague, still but that's the idea. This email is not a
formal proposal but a starting point to move this conversation forward. Is this
something other teams would be interested in? Is this something some teams would
be entirely against? Why?

From a governance perspective, projects are already empowered to do this and
they don't (and won't) need to be granted permission to have stabilization
cycles. However, the TC could work on formalizing this process so that teams
have a reference to follow when they want to have one. For example, we would
have to formalize how projects announce they want to have a stabilization cycle
(I believe it should be done before the mid-term of the ongoing cycle).

Thoughts? Feedback?
Flavio


[0] http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/tc/2015/tc.2015-11-03-20.07.log.html (20:47:02)

-- 
@flaper87
Flavio Percoco
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