Open Stack

TL;DR: bug czar role for Nova is vacant from now on


After doing bug triage for ~1 year, which was quiet interesting, it's
time for me to move to different topics. My tasks within the company
internal team are shifting too. Unfortunately less Nova for me in the
next (hopefully short) time. That means I'm resigning from the bug czar
role as of now.


Observations in this timeframe
------------------------------

* The quality of most of the bug reports could be better. Very often
they are not actionable. A bug report which isn't actionable burns
resources without any benefit. The pattern I've seen is:
    * 1/3 : invalid because they are support requests or a wrong
understanding
    * 1/3 : could be reasonable but essential information is missing
    * 1/3 : sounds reasonable + has a little info, should be looked at
  Very few follow this template which is shown when you open a new
report: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Nova/BugsTeam/BugReportTemplate

* We get ~40 new bug reports per week. With the current number of people
who do bug triage, the number of overall bug reports doesn't decline. I
started collecting data 6 months ago:

http://45.55.105.55:3000/dashboard/db/openstack-bugs?from=now-6M&panelId=1&fullscreen

* I wish the cores would engage more in bug triaging. If one core every
other week would do the bug triage for 1 week, a core would have to do
that only once per dev cycle. I'm aware of the review backlog though :/

* I wish more non-cores would engage more in bug triaging.

* We don't have contacts for a lot of areas in Nova:
  https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Nova/BugTriage#Tag_Owner_List

* Keeping the bug reports in a consistent state is cumbersome:
  http://45.55.105.55:8082/bugs-dashboard.html#tabInProgressStale
  We could introduce more automation here.


Things we should continue
-------------------------

* Bug reports older that the oldest supported stable release should be
  expired. Maybe best when the EOL tag gets applied.

https://github.com/openstack-infra/release-tools/blob/master/expire_old_bug_reports.py
  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-May/095654.html

* We never came to a real conclusion how the ops communicated the RFEs
to us. The way of using "wishlist" bug reports wasn't successful IMO.
The last proposal was to use the ops ML to bring an RFE into some
actionable shape and then create a backlog spec out of it.
  http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2016-March/089365.html



Things we should start
----------------------

* A cross-project discussion of (easy) ways to collect and send debug
data to upstream OpenStack. Almost no bug report in Nova had the result
of "sosreport" attached although we ask for that in the report template.



Some last words
---------------

* Whoever wants to do the job next, I offer some kind of onboarding.

* I'll push a change to remove the IRC meetings in the next few days:
  http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/#Nova_Bugs_Team_Meeting

* The tooling I used will still be available at:
  https://github.com/markuszoeller/openstack/tree/master/scripts/launchpad

* My server which hosts some dashboards will still be available at:
  http://45.55.105.55:3000/dashboard/db/openstack-bugs
  http://45.55.105.55:8082/bugs-dashboard.html
  http://45.55.105.55:8082/bugs-stats.html

* I did an evaluation of Storyboard in July 2016 and it looks promising.
Give it a shot at: https://storyboard-dev.openstack.org/#!/project/2 If
you don't like something there, push a change, it's Python based.

* I'll still hang out in the IRC channels, but don't expect much from me.


Thanks a lot to the people who helped making Nova a better project by
doing bug triage! Special thanks to auggy who put a lot(!) of effort
into that.

See you (hopefully) in Barcelona!

--
Regards,
Markus Zoeller (markus_z)