Open Stack

On 03/06/2014 01:05 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
> One of the issues that the Nova team has definitely hit is
> Blueprint overload. At some point there were over 150 blueprints.
> Many of them were a single sentence.
> 
> The results of this have been that design review today is typically
> not happening on Blueprint approval, but is instead happening once
> the code shows up in the code review. So -1s and -2s on code review
> are a mix of design and code review. A big part of which is that
> design was never in any way sufficiently reviewed before the code
> started.

We certainly did better this cycle.  Having a team of people do the
reviews helped. We have some criteria documented [1].  Trying to do
reviews the blueprint whiteboard is just a painful disaster of a workflow.

> In today's Nova meeting a new thought occurred. We already have
> Gerrit which is good for reviewing things. It gives you detailed
> commenting abilities, voting, and history. Instead of attempting
> (and usually failing) on doing blueprint review in launchpad (or
> launchpad + an etherpad, or launchpad + a wiki page) we could do
> something like follows:
> 
> 1. create bad blueprint 2. create gerrit review with detailed
> proposal on the blueprint 3. iterate in gerrit working towards
> blueprint approval 4. once approved copy back the approved text
> into the blueprint (which should now be sufficiently detailed)
> 
> Basically blueprints would get design review, and we'd be pretty
> sure we liked the approach before the blueprint is approved. This
> would hopefully reduce the late design review in the code reviews
> that's happening a lot now.
> 
> There are plenty of niggly details that would be need to be worked
> out
> 
> * what's the basic text / template format of the design to be
> reviewed (probably want a base template for folks to just keep
> things consistent). * is this happening in the nova tree (somewhere
> in docs/ - NEP (Nova Enhancement Proposals), or is it happening in
> a separate gerrit tree. * are there timelines for blueprint
> approval in a cycle? after which point, we don't review any new
> items.
> 
> Anyway, plenty of details to be sorted. However we should figure
> out if the big idea has support before we sort out the details on
> this one.
> 
> Launchpad blueprints will still be used for tracking once things
> are approved, but this will give us a standard way to iterate on
> that content and get to agreement on approach.

I am a *HUGE* fan of the general idea.  It's a tool we already use for
review and iterating on text.  It seems like it would be a huge win.
I also think it would allow and encourage a lot more people to get
involved in the reviews.

I like the idea of iterating in gerrit until it's approved, and then
using blueprints to track status throughout development.  We could
copy the text back into the blueprint, or just have a link to the
proper file in the git repo.

I think a dedicated git repo for this makes sense.
openstack/nova-blueprints or something, or openstack/nova-proposals if
we want to be a bit less tied to launchpad terminology.

If folks are on board with the idea, I'm happy to work on getting a
repo set up.  The base template could be the first review against the
repo.

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Blueprints

-- 
Russell Bryant