Open Stack

Doug Hellmann wrote:
> [...]
> The release team used to (help) manage the launchpad series data.
> We stopped doing that a long time ago, as Jeremy pointed out, because
> it was not useful to *the release team* in the way we were managing
> the releases. We stopped tracking blueprints and bug fixes to try
> to predict which release they would land in and built tools to make
> it easier for teams to declare what they had completed through
> release notes instead.
> [...]

A bit more historical context around that.

Launchpad has a design flaw in how it uses milestones and series. Those 
are used both for pre-milestone planning (what you planned to do) and 
post-milestone reporting (what actually landed). Since what you plan to 
do never ends up being what you actually do, using the same fields to 
track both creates subtle issues. Trust me, I spent my early OpenStack 
years fighting that discrepancy and trying to provide a "release 
manager" view of OpenStack with it. As OpenStack grew, the amount of 
work needed went up and the quality of the result went down.

The solution is to use separate tools. Git history and reno are the only 
accurate way to track what landed. The task tracker should only do 
pre-milestone planning.

Then, what's the best way to track progress toward a milestone ? 
Launchpad was clearly not the best tool, otherwise we would not have 
random etherpads with lists of Launchpad links around release candidate 
time, or people tracking progress in external Trellos. A lot of people 
wanted more than just binary indicators like tags and milestone targeting.

Storyboard is designed to let you use tags, or lists, or boards, 
whatever the team finds convenient to organize the work. Don't get me 
wrong, it's not perfect, and it still has much more rough edges than I'd 
like. But at least it has the potential to become what we need. It 
doesn't try to do more than it should.

It's also worth repeating it is a task tracker, not a product management 
tool. So yes, you are missing the consistent views of "progress" and 
"what's landed" across all of OpenStack. But as Jeremy and Doug 
mentioned, the reality is that we bailed on providing that view through 
Launchpad a long time ago.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)