RFC: Proposal for Rel-Eng project management/planning

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:25:36AM -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Apr 2015 09:36:46 -0500
> Adam Miller <maxamillion at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hello all,
> >     Hot off the heals of my email to start a conversation about what
> > all it's going to take to get the Fedora Rel-Eng Staging environment
> > up and running again[0] I wanted to make a proposal for a new way to
> > manage projects that can be broken down into small consumable "units
> > of work" much in line with kanban[1].
> 
> Note that many of these topics would be good for a meeting/more
> interactive discussion, IMHO. ;) 

Good point.  Sounds like we should pull one together -- at least with
Adam (obviously), reps from rel-eng, infrastructure, apps side, and a
program manager if possible.  I think Matthew would likely also want
to attend; I definitely would.

Do we have enough interest that I should set up a whenisgood for this?

> > Proposal:
> >     Projects would be planned in the open in irc meetings (logged with
> > meetbot) and documented in the wiki for general overview and
> > posterity, from there this is broken down into specific units of work
> > that can be tracked and picked up (hopefully) by any interested member
> > of the Rel-Eng team. 
> 
> Well, the wiki is kind of horrible for planning things. It might work,
> but it's much easier for a wiki page to start growing moss and decaying
> than a trac ticket IMHO. So, I would suggest trac (or whatever
> ticketing system) instead of wiki for projects. 

If we're talking about rel-eng stuff, it seems like a good idea to use
that Trac for visibility rather than a separate one.  Maybe a new
component is needed?  Don't want to get bikesheddy here, just trying
to avoid a disconnect.

> > I like to think this will make the process of
> > work transparent to the broader community as well as offer an
> > approachable avenue for new Rel-Eng team members to join in allowing
> > them to select low-hanging-fruit type units of work to use as learning
> > experiences.
> >     Also, the details of this project planning workflow (whatever it
> > ends up being) would be documented in the Fedora wiki such that it
> > could be used as part of an "on-boarding" document for community
> > members interested in joining the Fedora Rel-Eng team.
> 
> Sure, that sounds great. 

We just had a new addition to our kernel team who is dogfooding that
team's wiki information to find out what we need to fix for
contributors.  Seems like this is somewhat an opportunity for the
same?

Having team and workflow details out of date on the wiki, and having
few contributors, are sort of a "vicious cycle" problem.  Breaking the
cycle with some better docs is a great idea.

> > My hope here is to introduce a new piece of infrastructure to fill
> > this requirement that provides a kanban-style board of cards much like
> > Trello[2] but using a FOSS solution that we can host ourselves. For
> > this I'd like to propose the use of Cantas[3]. (This part would likely
> > need a request sent to Fedora Infrastructure team unless we're fine
> > just hosting it somewhere like OpenShift Online).
> > 
> > Questions, comments and general snide remarks welcome! :)
> 
> As mentioned in a followup, it would need to get packaged up, etc if we
> want to host one. 

I suggested to David Gay (oddshocks) that he look at this for
packaging.


-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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