Open Stack

On 24 October 2013 04:33, Russell Bryant <rbryant at redhat.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> At the last Nova meeting we started talking about some updates to the
> Nova blueprint process for the Icehouse cycle.  I had hoped we could
> talk about and finalize this in a Nova design summit session on "Nova
> Project Structure and Process" [1], but I think we need to push forward
> on finalizing this as soon as possible so that it doesn't block current
> work being done.

Cool

> Here is a first cut at the process.  Let me know what you think is
> missing or should change.  I'll get the result of this thread posted on
> the wiki.
>
> 1) Proposing a Blueprint
>
> Proposing a blueprint for Nova is not much different than other
> projects.  You should follow the instructions here:
>
>     https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Blueprints
>
> The particular important step that seems to be missed by most is:
>
> "Once it is ready for PTL review, you should set:
>
> Milestone: Which part of the release cycle you think your work will be
> proposed for merging."
>
> That is really important.  Due to the volume of Nova blueprints, it
> probably will not be seen until you do this.

The other thing I'm seeing some friction on is 'significant features'
: it sometimes feels like folk are filing blueprints for everything
that isn't 'the code crashed' style problems, and while I appreciate
folk wanting to work within the system, blueprints are a heavyweight
tool, primarily suited for things that require significant
coordination.

> 2) Blueprint Review Team
>
> Ensuring blueprints get reviewed is one of the responsibilities of the
> PTL.  However, due to the volume of Nova blueprints, it's not practical
> for me to do it alone.  A team of people (nova-drivers) [2], a subset of
> nova-core, will be doing blueprint reviews.

Why a subset of nova-core? With nova-core defined as 'knows the code
well *AND* reviews a lot', I can see that those folk are in a position
to spot a large class of design defects. However, there are plenty of
folk with expertise in e.g. SOA, operations, deployment @ scale, who
are not nova-core but who will spot plenty of issues. Is there some
way they can help out?

> By having more people reviewing blueprints, we can do a more thorough
> job and have a higher quality result.
>
> Note that even though there is a nova-drivers team, *everyone* is
> encouraged to participate in the review process by providing feedback on
> the mailing list.

I'm not sure about this bit here: blueprints don't have the spec
content, usually thats in an etherpad; etherpads are editable by
everyone - wouldn't it be better to keep the conversation together? I
guess part of my concern here comes back to the (ab)use of blueprints
for shallow features.

> 3) Blueprint Review Criteria
>
> Here are some things that the team reviewing blueprints should look for:
>
> The blueprint ...
>
>  - is assigned to the person signing up to do the work
>
>  - has been targeted to the milestone when the code is
>    planned to be completed
>
>  - is an appropriate feature for Nova.  This means it fits with the
>    vision for Nova and OpenStack overall.  This is obviously very
>    subjective, but the result should represent consensus.
>
>  - includes enough detail to be able to complete an initial design
>    review before approving the blueprint. In many cases, the design
>    review may result in a discussion on the mailing list to work
>    through details. A link to this discussion should be left in the
>    whiteboard of the blueprint for reference.  This initial design
>    review should be completed before the blueprint is approved.
>
>  - includes information that describes the user impact (or lack of).
>    Between the blueprint and text that comes with the DocImpact flag [3]
>    in commits, the docs team should have *everything* they need to
>    thoroughly document the feature.

I'd like to add:
 - has an etherpad with the design (the blueprint summary has no
markup and is a poor place for capturing the design).

> Once the review has been complete, the blueprint should be marked as
> approved and the priority should be set.  A set priority is how we know
> from the blueprint list which ones have already been reviewed.


> 4) Blueprint Prioritization
>
> I would like to do a better job of using priorities in Icehouse.  The
> priority field services a couple of purposes:
>
>   - helps reviewers prioritize their time
>
>   - helps set expectations for the submitter for how reviewing this
>     work stacks up against other things
>
> In the last meeting we discussed an idea that I think is worth trying at
> least for icehouse-1 to see if we like it or not.  The idea is that
> *every* blueprint starts out at a Low priority, which means "best
> effort, but no promises".  For a blueprint to get prioritized higher, it
> should have 2 nova-core members signed up to review the resulting code.
>
> If we do this, I suspect we may end up with more blueprints at Low, but
> I also think we'll end up with a more realistic list of blueprints.  The
> reality is if a feature doesn't have reviewers agreeing to do the
> review, it really is in a "best effort, but no promises" situation.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Its the same basic triage process
we're using in the TripleO Kanban experiment - things that aren't in
the project current roadmap don't get unlimited resources; some things
are declined, and things in the roadmap everyone in the team comes
together to ensure a timely, effective delivery. The difference is
that we're operating with a deliberate overlap between folk's effort -
keeping the concurrent topics being worked on low, sacrificing a
little output to duplicate effort, but gaining a whole lot of
velocity.

Joe: I disagree about merging patches with not-"approved" blueprints.
They are no worse than patches that don't have a blueprint.

Patches for a *declined* blueprint however, I agree they should
require special examination.

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud