Open Stack

Monty Taylor wrote:
> [...]
> We're looking at what our options are, and Thierry is examining them to
> see how tolerable their differences would be to our community.
> 
> I propose that we have a solid answer and migration plan to put in front
> of people by Vancouver at the latest.

StoryBoard was started initially as a proof-of-concept of what we'd
actually love to see in the tool we use for task tracking. I was writing
requirements documents to help the Infra team look into alternate
solutions, and finally decided that code could be worth a thousand words.

At that point, people got very excited at the idea of having a tool that
would precisely map our workflows and processes, rather than having a
tool you have to adapt your workflows and processes to. Let's use the
POC today! Since that initial excitement, three things happened.

(1) We realized coding the task tracking part is not really long or
difficult. It's all the boring infrastructure that is long and painful:
subscriptions, configurable email notifications, ACLs...

(2) We did not get the surge in contributors we expected to get. The
StoryBoard API server is built like an OpenStack API server to increase
dev familiarity, but HP and Mirantis were the only ones to dedicate
headcount to the effort.

(3) With StoryBoard being developed not as fast as we hoped, time
passed, some requirements changed, new teams have needs, and those are
not necessarily easily served with a beta tool.

So we are standing at the crossroads again.

First, we need to determine if we are ready to accept to use a tool that
is not tailored-fit to our workflows, in exchange for more immediate
gratification. That is what the "Biting the bullet" from Monty is about.
It's not an easy thing to do... after all the reason we want to move
away from Launchpad is the pain derived from using a tool that does not
fit our workflows and processes.

Second, we need to see which solution is the closest to "being usable
for us", and therefore should be the way forward. When you work on a
single project team, it's easy to overlook that we have a pretty unique
set of needs in OpenStack -- the ability to efficiently track tasks
across a large set of projects and branches (for our horizontal teams
sanity). Not all tools can be used like that. In fact, before we started
StoryBoard, Launchpad was still the best tool for that.

Personally I'm not totally convinced StoryBoard is out of the race. We
may realize that the amount of custom development needed to bring
existing solutions to a point where we can use them for task tracking in
OpenStack is superior to the amount of development needed to bring
StoryBoard at an acceptable usability level. But then, I don't
personally wield any significant development headcount, so I can't make
the choice: I can only define what "usable for OpenStack" minimally means.

It's also worth noting that Launchpad is not (yet) out of the game. It
could grow the set of features we need (ability to auth using
OpenStackID, multi-task features with tags and comments, task
dashboards, no more silly timeouts, comprehensive API...). Unlikely, but
still possible :)

I look forward to that discussion in Vancouver on the future of task
tracking in OpenStack.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)