Open Stack

On 06/28/2017 10:33 AM, Ben Nemec wrote:
> 
> 
> On 06/23/2017 11:52 AM, Sean Dague wrote:
>> The Nova bug backlog is just over 800 open bugs, which while
>> historically not terrible, remains too large to be collectively usable
>> to figure out where things stand. We've had a few recent issues where we
>> just happened to discover upgrade bugs filed 4 months ago that needed
>> fixes and backports.
>>
>> Historically we've tried to just solve the bug backlog with volunteers.
>> We've had many a brave person dive into here, and burn out after 4 - 6
>> months. And we're currently without a bug lead. Having done a big giant
>> purge in the past
>> (http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-September/046517.html)
>>
>> I know how daunting this all can be.
>>
>> I don't think that people can currently solve the bug triage problem at
>> the current workload that it creates. We've got to reduce the smart
>> human part of that workload.
>>
>> But, I think that we can also learn some lessons from what active github
>> projects do.
>>
>> #1 Bot away bad states
>>
>> There are known bad states of bugs - In Progress with no open patch,
>> Assigned but not In Progress. We can just bot these away with scripts.
>> Even better would be to react immediately on bugs like those, that helps
>> to train folks how to use our workflow. I've got some starter scripts
>> for this up at - https://github.com/sdague/nova-bug-tools
> 
> Just saw the update on https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/1698010 and
> I don't agree that assigned but not in progress is an invalid state.  If
> it persists for a period of time then sure, but to me assigning yourself
> a bug is a signal that you're working on it and nobody else needs to.
> Otherwise you end up with multiple people working a bug without
> realizing someone else already was.  I've seen that happen more than once.

The other case, where folks assign themselves and never do anything,
happens about 100 times a month.

We don't live in an exclusive lock environment, anyone can push a fix
for a bug, and gerrit assigns it to them. I don't see why we'd treat LP
any differently. Yes, this sometimes leads to duplicate fixes, however
in the current model it's far more frequent for bugs to be blocked away
as "assigned" when no one is working on them.

A future version might be smarter and give folks a 7 day window or
something, but parsing back the history to understand the right logic
there is tricky enough that it's a future enhancement at best.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net