Open Stack

Hi!

Following the forum, the session moderators should summarize how their
session went and detail next steps, to give opportunity to those who
couldn't be around in person to catch up if interested. Here is my quick
summary of the "Should we kill Stackalytics" session. You can find the
etherpad at [1].

After a quick intro on the history of Stackalytics, we spent some time
discussing the issues with the current situation. Beyond limited
maintenance resources, some accuracy issues and partial infra
transition, it became clear in the session that the major driver for a
change is that Stackalytics incentivizes the wrong behavior(s),
especially in new contributors and organizations in their first step of
involvement. As the only "official" and visible way to measure
contribution, it encourages dumping useless patches and reviews, and
does not value strategic contributions over more tactical contributions.
Beyond wasted resources and being annoying to core reviewers, it fails
to drive those new contributors to what could be extremely useful
contributions, and prevents them to step up in the community.

At the same time, several people in the room raised that they would
rather not support solutions that would just "kill Stackalytics". Having
access to raw metrics on project contribution is useful, for various
profiles. It's when you start adding apples to oranges, or deriving
rankings from those compound metrics that things start to go very wrong.
If Stackalytics was just removed, no doubt it would soon be reborn in
other forms elsewhere. Also removing it while not providing anything to
replace it is totally useless.

We need to first provide a clear incentive to work on desirable items
and under-staffed critical teams. The TC is exploring how we could
produce such a "help wanted" list (action driven by myself), together
with how to give proper recognition to the individuals working on that
and/or the organizations funding their work. Once that is done, we'll
likely explore how to remove most of the misleading rankings and graphs
from Stackalytics to focus it on raw metric information. Before we can
do that, we need to complete transition of Stackalytics to OpenStack
infrastructure. Once that work is completed it will be time to
reconsider our options and have a follow-up discussion session.

In summary, the following follow-on work items were identified:

1. Set up the "help wanted" list at TC level and associated hall of fame
(action: ttx and TC members)
2. Complete Stackalytics migration to infra (action: infra team, mrmartin)
3. Explore which are the most misleading information/graphs from
stackalytics that we might want to remove
4. Reconsider the issue once that work is completed

If interested, please jump in! In particular we need help with
completing the migration to infra. If interested you can reach out to
fungi (Infra team PTL) nor mrmartin (who currently helps with the
transition work).

[1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/BOS-forum-should-we-kill-stackalytics

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)