Open Stack

Russell Bryant <rbryant at redhat.com> writes:

> On 03/24/2014 12:34 PM, James E. Blair wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> So recently we started this experiment with the compute and qa programs
>> to try using Gerrit to review blueprints.  Launchpad is deficient in
>> this area, and while we hope Storyboard will deal with it much better,
>> but it's not ready yet.
>
> This seems to be a point of confusion.  My view is that Storyboard isn't
> intended to implement what gerrit provides.  Given that, it seems like
> we'd still be using this whether the tracker is launchpad or storyboard.

I don't think it's intended to implement what Gerrit provides, however,
I'm not sure what Gerrit provides is _exactly_ what's needed here.  I do
agree that Gerrit is a much better tool than launchpad for collaborating
on some kinds of blueprints.

However, one of the reasons we're creating StoryBoard is so that we have
a tool that is compatible with our workflow and meets our requirements.
It's not just about tracking work items, it should be a tool for
creating, evaluating, and progressing changes to projects (stories),
across all stages.

I don't envision the end-state for storyboard to be that we end up
copying data back and forth between it and Gerrit.  Since we're
designing a system from scratch, we might as well design it to do what
we want.

One of our early decisions was to say that UX and code stories have
equally important use cases in StoryBoard.  Collaboration around UX
style blueprints (especially those with graphical mock-ups) sets a
fairly high bar for the kind of interaction we will support.

Gerrit is a great tool for reviewing code and other text media.  But
somehow it is even worse than launchpad for collaborating when visual
media are involved.  Quite a number of blueprints could benefit from
better support for that (not just UI mockups but network diagrams, etc).
We can learn a lot from the experiment of using Gerrit for blueprint
review, and I think it's going to help make StoryBoard a lot better for
all of our use cases.

-Jim