[openstack-dev] use of storyboard (was [TC] Stein Goal Selection)

Zane Bitter zbitter at redhat.com
Mon Jun 11 16:39:36 UTC 2018


On 11/06/18 10:23, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> Excerpts from Dmitry Tantsur's message of 2018-06-11 16:00:41 +0200:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 06/11/2018 03:53 PM, Ruby Loo wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I don't want to hijack the initial thread, but am now feeling somewhat guilty
>>> about not being vocal wrt Storyboard. Yes, ironic migrated to Storyboard in the
>>> beginning of this cycle. To date, I have not been pleased with replacing
>>> Launchpad with Storyboard. I believe that Storyboard is somewhat
>>> still-in-progress, and that there were/are some features (stories) that are
>>> outstanding that would make its use better.
>>>
>>>   From my point of view (as a developer and core, not a project manager or PTL)
>>> using Storyboard has made my day-to-day work worse. Granted, any migration is
>>> without headaches. But some of the main things, like searching for our RFEs
>>> (that we had tagged in Launchpad) wasn't possible. I haven't yet figured out how
>>> to limit a search to only the 'ironic' project using that 'search' like GUI, so
>>> I have been frustrated trying to find particular bugs that I *knew* existed but
>>> had not memorized the bug number.
>>
>> Yeah, I cannot fully understand the search. I would expect something explicit
>> like Launchpad or better something command-based like "project:openstack/ironic
>> pxe". This does not seem to work, so I also wonder how to filter all stories
>> affecting a project.
>>
> 
> Searching tripped me up for the first couple of weeks, too.
> Storyboard's search field is a lot "smarter" than expected. Or maybe
> you'd call it "magic". Either way, it was confusing, but you don't have
> to use any special syntax in the UI.
> 
> To search for a project, type the name of the project in the search
> field and then *wait* for the list of drop-down options to appear.
> The first item in the list will be a "raw" search for the term. The
> others will have little icons indicating their type. The project
> icon looks like a little cube, for example.  If I go to
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/search and type "openstack/ironic"
> I get a list that includes openstack/ironic, openstack/ironic-inspector,
> etc.
> 
> Select the project you want from the list and hit enter, and you'll
> get a list of all of the stories with tasks attached to the project.

Yeah, it's actually pretty powerful, but the UX is a pain. For a 
workflow as common as searching within a project, there should never be 
a step that involves *waiting*. This could be easily fixed: if the user 
is on the page for a project (or project group) and clicks on the search 
tab, the search field should be autopopulated with the project so they 
only have to opt out when they want to search something else, rather 
than opt in every time by typing the project's name again... waiting... 
clicking on one of the inscrutable icons. (Prepopulating in this way 
would also help teach people how the search field works and what the 
little icons mean, so that it wouldn't take weeks to figure out how to 
search within a project even when you have to start from scratch.)

There are a lot of rough edges like this. An issue tracker is an 
incredibly complicated class of application, and projects like Launchpad 
have literally millions of issues tracked, so basically everything that 
could come up has. Storyboard is not at that stage yet.

Some other bugbears:

* There's no help link anywhere. (This appears to be because there's 
nothing to link to.)

* There's no way to mark a story as a duplicate of another.

* Numeric IDs in URLs instead of project names are a serious barrier to 
usability.

* Default query size of 10 unless you (a) are logged in, and (b) 
increased it to something sane in your Profile (pro tip: do this now!) 
makes it really painful to use, especially since the full text search is 
not very accurate, the prev/next arrows appear to be part of a 
competition to make UI elements as tiny as possible(4 pixels wide, and 
even the click target is only 16), and moving between pages is kinda 
slow. Also I changed the setting in my profile the other day, and when I 
logged in again today it had been reset to 10.

* Actually, I just tried scrolling through the project list after 
setting the query size back to 100, and the ranges I got were:
   - 1 to 100 of 344 ok so far
   - 101 to 200 of 344 good good
   - 100101 to 344 of 344 wat

* Actually, *is* there any full-text search? The search page says only 
that you can search for "Keyword in a story or task title". That would 
explain why it's impossible to find most things you're looking for.

* You can't even use Google to search it, I suspect because only issues 
that are linked to from other sites are visible to the crawler due to 
there being no sitemap.xml.

* Showing project groups in reverse chronological order of their 
creation instead of alphabetical order is bizarre.

* Launchpad fields always display in fixed-width fonts with linebreaks 
preserved. Storyboard uses Markdown. The migration process makes no 
attempt to preserve the formatting, so a lot of the 
descriptions/comments containing code/logs/heat templates is unreadable.

* No upper limit on text box width makes for super long lines of text 
that are difficult to read. Proportionally-spaced text should generally 
be limited to a maximum width of ~33em http://webtypography.net/2.1.2 
(in fact the typography in general is wanting, starting with all of the 
text being too small).

* References in comments to other bugs, which were links in Launchpad, 
are not linked to either the bugs in Launchpad or the stories in 
Storyboard after the migration.

The good news is these are just rough edges, and they all seem fixable. 
(Except for the lack of full-text search, if that actually is the case.) 
The bad news is that we're at the stage where it's not ready for 
primetime, but it won't get ready without major projects starting to use 
it, but while it's getting ready those projects are in for a lot of pain 
and are awkwardly disconnected from all of the projects still on 
Launchpad (you can't simply move a ticket from one project to another 
any more if they're on different systems).

cheers,
Zane.

> To search based on words in the title or body of the story or task,
> just type those and then select the item with the magnifying glass
> icon for the "raw" search.
> 
> It's not necessary to use search to get a list of open items, though.
> You can also navigate directly to a project or group of projects.
> For example, by clicking the "Project Groups" icon on the left you
> end up at https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project_group/list
> and by entering "ironic" in the search field there you'll see that
> there are 23 projects in the ironic group (wow!). Clicking the name
> of the project group will take you to a view showing the current
> open items.
> 
> I strongly encourage teams to set up worklists or dashboards with
> saved searches or manually curated lists of stories or tasks. For
> example, the release team uses
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/board/64 to keep track of our work
> within the cycle.
> 
> Doug
> 
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