Open Stack

Ben Nemec wrote:
> On 9/25/18 3:29 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
>> Absence of priorities was an initial design choice[1] based on the 
>> fact that in an open collaboration every group, team, organization has 
>> their own views on what the priority of a story is, so worklist and 
>> tags are better ways to capture that. Also they don't really work 
>> unless you triage everything. And then nobody really looks at them to 
>> prioritize their work, so they are high cost for little benefit.
> 
> So was the storyboard implementation based on the rant section then? 
> Because I don't know that I agree with/understand some of the assertions 
> there.
> 
> First, don't we _need_ to triage everything? At least on some minimal 
> level? Not looking at new bugs at all seems like the way you end up with 
> a security bug open for two years *ahem*. Not that I would know anything 
> about that (it's been fixed now, FTR).

StoryBoard's initial design is definitely tainted by an environment that 
has changed since. Back in 2014, most teams did not triage every bug, 
and were basically using Launchpad as a task tracker (you created the 
bugs that you worked on) rather than a bug tracker (you triage incoming 
requests and prioritize them).

Storyboard is therefore designed primarily a task tracker (a way to 
organize work within teams), so it's not great as an issue tracker (a 
way for users to report issues). The tension between the two concepts 
was explored in [1], with the key argument that trying to do both at the 
same time is bound to create frustration one way or another. In PM 
literature you will even find suggestions that the only way to solve the 
diverging requirements is to use two completely different tools (with 
ways to convert a reported issue into a development story). But that 
"solution" works a lot better in environments where the users and the 
developers are completely separated (proprietary software).

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/StoryBoard/Vision

> [...]
> Also, like it or not there is technical debt we're carrying over here. 
> All of our bug triage up to this point has been based on launchpad 
> priorities, and as I think I noted elsewhere it would be a big step 
> backward to completely throw that out. Whatever model for prioritization 
> and triage that we choose, I feel like there needs to be a reasonable 
> migration path for the thousands of existing triaged lp bugs in OpenStack.

I agree, which is why I'm saying that the "right" answer might not be 
the "best" answer.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)