Open Stack

On Thu, Jan 21 2016, Flavio Percoco wrote:

> So, I don't think it has to be the entire cycle. It could also be a couple of
> milestones (or even just 1). Thing is, I believe this has to be communicated and
> I want teams to know this is fine and they are encouraged to do so.
>
> Tl;DR: It's fine to tell folks no new features will land on this and the
> upcoming milestone because they'll be used to stabilize the project.

I can understand that, though I think it's a very naive approach. If
your project built technical debt for the last N cycles, unfortunately I
doubt that stating you're gonna work for ⅓ of a cycle on reducing it is
going to improve your project on the long run – that's why I was saying
"band-aid".

I'd be more inclined to spend time trying to fix the root cause that
pushes projects on the slope of the technical debt rate increase.

> Unfortunately, just talking and proposing to fix them doesn't help. We don't
> control contributor's management and we can't make calls for them other than
> proposing things. I'm not saying this will fix that issue but at least it'll
> communicate properly that that will be the only way to contribute to project X
> in that period of time.

Yes, exactly. So it's my view¹ that people will just do something else
for 1.5 month (e.g. work downstream, take vacation…), and then come back
knocking at your door for their feature to be merged, now that this
stabilization period is over. And even in the best case scenario, you'll
merge some fixes and improvement, and that's it: in the end you'll end
up with the same problems in N cycle, and you'll have to redo that
again.

That's why I'm talking about fixing the root causes. :-)

Cheers,

¹  pessimistic or realistic, YMMV :-)

-- 
Julien Danjou
# Free Software hacker
# https://julien.danjou.info
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