Tech Debt Week Retrospective

[Ralph Bean]

OK -- assessment time.  How did Tech Debt Week go?

There's a list at the bottom of the wiki page of the things we were
able to accomplish:  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Debt

We got a good bit of ansible stuff cleaned up.  Staging had a few
sites that were broken and we fixed those in tandem with fixing rube,
our staging-testing tool.  We were able to silence some of the error
emails that were unnecessarily coming out of the bodhi backend (thus
raising the signal-to-noise ratio).  And we were able to remove some
of the code duplication around python-fedora (both server side
components like flask_fas_openid and client-side components like the
openidbaseclient).  That's a good chunk, especially for a first try
at organized tech debt fighting.

I'll note that participation was not up to the level I was expecting.
It seemed like there was sizable interest at Flock and in infra
meetings at the end of 2015, but there were only a few of us actually
working on tech debt tasks during the week.

I've been thinking about it and trying to come up with possible
explanations:
- It was the first time we tried something like this.  We weren't sure
  what to do and so we just need to try again until its comfortable.
- It was too poorly defined.  We were pretty vague about what was
  kinds of things to do.  The intent was to open up people to pursue
  what they want to hack on, but perhaps it was a turn-off.
- The first week of the New Year wasn't the best choice of time.
  Perhaps people were anxious to get the jump on other projects after
  the holidays and debt-wrangling wasn't attractive.
- Others?

Should we try this again in a few months?  If so, what should we try
differently?

Cheers!
 - Ralph