Open Stack

OK, I'll bite, being one of the until-last-week offenders...

On Tue, May 23, 2017 at 4:59 AM, Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
> As part of release management we remind projects of the release cycle
> deadlines, including the ones regarding the release goals process.
>
> According to [1], "each PTL is responsible for adding their planning
> artifact links to the goal document before the first milestone
> deadline", and "if the goal does not apply to a project or the project
> has already met the goal, the PTL should explain why that is the case,
> instead of linking to planning artifacts".
>
> However, for Pike goals we are 6 weeks past the pike-1 milestone, and we
> still have about half the project teams that haven't provided answers
> (despite two reminders posted in the release countdown emails). Such a
> large share goes beyond the usual occasional misses, and points to a
> more systemic issue, that we might want to address before the Queens
> campaign starts.
>
> A few questions to bootstrap the discussion:
>
> - Is it that the reporting process is too heavy ? (requiring answers
> from projects that are obviously unaffected)

I've thought about this, OSC was unaffected by one of the goals but
not the other, so I can't really hide in this bucket.  It really is
not that hard to put up a review saying "not me".

> - Is it that people ignore the deadlines and missed the reminders ?
> (some unaffected project teams also do not do releases, and therefore
> ignore the release countdown emails)

In my case, not so much "ignore" but "put off until tomorrow" where
tomorrow turned in to 6 weeks.  I really don't have a hard reason
other than simply not prioritizing it because I knew one of the goals
was going to take some coordination work

> - Is it that in periods of resource constriction, having release-wide
> goals is just too ambitious ? (although anecdotal data shows that most
> projects have already completed their goals)

While this may certainly be a possibility, I don't think we should
give in to the temptation to blame too much on losing people.  OSC was
hit by this too, yet the loss of core and contributors did not affect
the goals not getting done, that falls squarely on the PTL in this
case.

> - Is it that the goals should be more clearly owned by the community
> beyond just the TC? (and therefore the goals should be maintained in a
> repository with simpler approval rules and a larger approval group)

I do think that at least the perception of the goals being community
things should be increased if we can.  We fall in to the problem of
the TC proposing something and getting pushback about projects being
forced to do more work, yet we hear so much about how the TC needs to
take more leadership in technical direction (see TC vision feedback
for the latest round of this).

I'm not sure that the actual repo is the issue, are we having problems
getting reviews to approve these?  I don't see this but I'm also not
tracking the time to takes for them to get approved.

I believe it is just going to have to be a social thing that we need
to continue to push forward.

dt

-- 

Dean Troyer
dtroyer at gmail.com