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On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 01:05:15PM -0500, 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.
> 
> 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.

As someone who has complained about the awfulness of our blueprint
design docs & process many times, I'd welcome this effort to ensure
that we actually do detailed review. In concert with this I'd suggest
that we setup some kind of bot that would automatically add a -2
to any patch which is submitted where the linked blueprint is not
already approved. This would make it very clear to people who just
submit patches and create a blueprint just as a "tick box" for
process compliance, that they're doing it wrong. It would also make
it clear to reviewers that they shouldn't waste their time on patches
which are not approved.

Regards,
Daniel
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