RFC-84: What is slowing you down?

Data Management
#1

Opinions related to RFC-84 (what, if anything, is getting in the way of people being productive) can be posted here as well. See the original for some possible starting points.

#2

Is this just an announcement, or are we supposed to discuss this RFC here?

I would have thought that we’d want to keep discussion about the RFC on Jira where the RFC was filed.

#3

This was meant to be an experiment. Since this RFC is mostly gathering information and wouldn’t seem to necessarily require lots of interaction between contributors, keeping it all in one place seemed slightly less important than usual for RFCs.

#4

Here are a few things I feel hamper productivity. Most of these are already on somebody’s list to improve:

  • Slow CI system (though Jenkins is an improvement from BuildBot).
  • The current integration test does not test enough of our code.
  • We are letting too many bugs through due to lack of test coverage analysis and lack of linting our python code.
  • Closing RFCs is often more difficult than it should be.
  • Too many vetoes. This is a delicate balance. Too little veto power lets bad decisions through, or creates unnecessary churn. Too much veto power demoralizes those doing the work with the feeling that any attempt to change things will almost inevitably be blocked.
  • Too many overlapping communication channels. Confluence, HipChat, google hangouts, JIRA, github, discourse and mailing lists. There is too much overlap between the tools and too little commonality in how they operate (for instance JIRA and Confluence both have different, non-standard, poorly designed markup languages). If we can settle on a set of tools for awhile, maybe this will sort itself out. But it is a classic example that this RFC is being discussed on JIRA and here.
#5

That was actually kind of intentional to see which platform might be more attractive and whether RFC discussions could usefully occur here.

#6

Advantages of Discourse: quasi-threaded structure with reply context (JIRA comments are purely time-ordered), more appealing UI
Advantages of JIRA: one-stop shopping for RFCs

I think either can work. I’d like to keep our communication tools and rules simpler, though, so I’m in favor of discussion on JIRA as long as the primary record of an RFC is a JIRA issue (which I like). Still, experimenting with the feel of using Discourse makes sense to me.

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