Open Stack

Doug, Thierry,

Do we want the stewards to serve as the CPL for Release team as well?

-- Dims

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons#Release_management

On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 11:57 AM, Doug Hellmann <doug at doughellmann.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2016-09-07 17:43:59 +0200:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> As you probably know by now, starting with the Boston event in 2017, the
>> Summit will happen further away from the release day and more around the
>> middle of the next development cycle. You can find more info on the
>> rationale for that at [1] and [2] if interested, this is not the topic
>> of this email.
>>
>> One interesting side-effect is that since the timing of the election
>> period (for PTL and TC positions) is defined in the TC charter[3]
>> relative to the *Summit*, it means that (unless we change this) we'll
>> now run elections to renew PTL and TC positions in the middle of the
>> cycle. Crazy, right ? That's what I first thought. But after discussing
>> it with various people, this is not as crazy as it sounds.
>>
>> First, the current election timing is not perfect -- we change PTLs in
>> the middle of the design summit prep, with old PTLs making Design Summit
>> space requests that will affect their successor. It's not as if there
>> was a perfect timing for doing elections.
>>
>> Second, release cycles are longer than 6 months. They actually start a
>> few months before actual development starts, with discussions on next
>> cycle priorities and Design Summit prep. They continue a few months
>> after release, with critical stable branch backports and communication
>> about landed features. So they are one year-long, overlapping cycles
>> (like explained on the diagram at [4]). With that in mind, the PTL/TC
>> election actually would happen just before the start of the start of the
>> requirements-gathering pre-development phase of the next development
>> cycle, which makes a lot of sense.
>>
>> Now, the main drawback of holding elections in the middle of a
>> development cycle is that you don't want to introduce a discontinuity in
>> leadership in that development cycle. To mitigate that, we propose the
>> introduction of a new role, the "release steward", which would be
>> attached to the release cycle. That person (who may or may not double as
>> PTL) would be responsible for a complete release cycle on a given
>> project team, from requirements gathering phase to post-release
>> bugfix-backport phase. A sort of per-cycle release liaison on steroids.
>>
>> Since development cycles overlap, there would be two active release
>> stewards at all times. This would help with the awkward situation where
>> the PTL ends up having to think about the next cycle and prepare the
>> Design Summit (or PTG) while still being knee-deep juggling with feature
>> freeze exceptions, getting the current release out of the door, and
>> coordinating early critical fixes stable backports. Those two jobs could
>> be held by two different people.
>>
>> Now, some teams (especially those doing intermediary releases) may want
>> to use the same super-human to handle everything (PTL, release steward,
>> release+1 steward), and some others might use two or three humans to
>> spread the load. That's up to them. But once designated by the
>> newly-elected PTL, the release steward would be responsible for the full
>> release cycle and would not be displaced by the next PTL 6 months later.
>> One year being a long time, if a steward needs to step down, the
>> currently-active PTL would appoint someone else to finish the job.
>>
>> With this new concept I think we can get the best of both worlds, and
>> keep the election period as currently defined in the charter (rather
>> than having to change it). The PTLs we will elect in the coming weeks
>> won't be renewed before April, 2017 -- while Pike development will start
>> in February.
>>
>> I know this can all be a bit confusing, so feel free to reach out to me
>> with questions on this.
>>
>> [1] http://www.openstack.org/ptg
>> [2] http://www.openstack.org/ptg/ptgfaq/
>> [3]
>> http://governance.openstack.org/reference/charter.html#election-for-ptl-seats
>> [4]
>> http://www.openstack.org/themes/openstack/images/summit-ptg-timeline-revised.png
>>
>
> Thanks for writing this up, Thierry. It sounds similar to what I
> know a few companies are already doing internally.  It should help
> with continuity upstream, too, since the steward will work on a
> given release through its whole life-cycle, rather than handing off
> each time a new release cycle starts.
>
> Doug
>
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-- 
Davanum Srinivas :: https://twitter.com/dims