Open Stack

Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2018-01-17 11:51:52 +0100:
> Emilien Macchi wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 8:29 AM, Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> wrote:
> >>> - how do we deal milestones in stories and also how can we have a
> >>> dashboard with an overview per milestone (useful for PTL + TripleO
> >>> release managers).
> >>
> >> So far, the general suggestion for stuff like this is to settle on a
> >> consistent set of story tags to apply. It really depends on whether
> >> you're trying to track this at a story or task level (there is no
> >> per-task tagging implemented yet at any rate). I could imagine, for
> >> example, setting something like tripleo-r2 as a tag on stories whose
> >> TripleO deliverable tasks are targeting Rocky milestone #2, and then
> >> you could have an automatic board with stories matching that tag and
> >> lanes based on the story status.
> > 
> > Does this kind of board exist already?
> 
> Rather than using tags, you can make a Board itself your "milestone
> view". To make a task/story part of the milestone objectives, you just
> add it to your board. Then use various lanes on that board to track
> progress.
> 
> See the "Zuul v3 Operational" board in
> https://storyboard-blog.sotk.co.uk/things-that-storyboard-does-differently.html
> for an example -- I think it's pretty close to what you need.
> 
> I /think/ if you used a tag you'd miss a feature: the ability to specify
> a board lane as needing to automatically contain "all things that match
> a given criteria (like a tag match) but which would not already appear
> in one of the other lanes on this board". *And* allow to move things
> from that automatic lane to the other lanes. That way you can have a
> board that automatically contains all the things that match your tag (by
> default in the automatic lane), but still lets you move things around
> onto various lanes.
> 
> I don't think that exists, which is why I'd use a Board directly as a
> "milestone tracker", rather than go through tagging.
> 

That particular example board was built from tasks semi-automatically,
using a tag, by this script running on a cron job somewhere:

https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/zuul/tree/tools/update-storyboard.py?h=feature/zuulv3

We did this so that we could have a rule "any task that is open with
the zuulv3 tag must be on this board". Jim very astutely noticed that
I was not very good at being a robot that did this and thus created the
script to ease me into retirement from zuul project management.

The script adds new things in New, and moves tasks automatically to
In Progress, and then removes them when they are completed. We would
periodically groom the "New" items into an appropriate lane with the hopes
of building what you might call a rolling-sprint in Todo, and calling
out blocked tasks in a regular meeting. Stories were added manually as
a way to say "look in here and add tasks", and manually removed when
the larger effort of the story was considered done.

I rather like the semi-automatic nature of it, and would definitely
suggest that something like this be included in Storyboard if other
groups find the board building script useful. This made a cross-project
effort between Nodepool and Zuul go more smoothly as we had some more
casual contributors to both, and some more full-time.

The best part about a tag is that it is readily visible on the story
view. I think given that alone, tags are a pretty valid way to call out
what milestone you think a story is aimed at.