Open Stack

I love the idea of treating usability as a first-class citizen; to do that, we definitely need a core set of people who are passionate about the topic in order to keep it alive in the OpenStack gestalt. Contributors tend to prioritize work on new, concrete features over “non-functional” requirements that are perceived as tedious and/or abstract. Common (conscious and unconcious) rationalizations include:

  *   I don’t have time
  *   It’s too hard
  *   I don’t know how

Over time, I think we as OpenStack should strive toward a rough consensus on basic UX tenets, similar to what we have wrt architecture (i.e., Basic Design Tenets<https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/BasicDesignTenets>). PTLs should champion these tenets within their respective teams, mentoring individual members on the why and how, and be willing to occasionally postpone sexy new features, in order to free the requisite bandwidth for making OpenStack more pleasant to use.

IMO, our initiatives around security, usability, documentation, testing etc. will only succeed inasmuch as we make them a part of our culture and identity.

@kgriffs
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