Suggestion to improve working together

Development
#1

Hi,

first of all, thanks to the great discussions we had in Ghent. Very appreciated. One suggestion came to my mind which would improve a lot in the way we are working together for bigger changes / features. It would be really great to have a list available in redmine / wiki on which bigger topics people are currently working on. I don’t mean small bug fixes or small enhancements. I’m referring to larger features like the Ansible changes on which multiple person are working on.

I’m thinking about a list something like this:

Topic: Feature 1
Short Description: XYZ
Developers: Name 1, Name 2
State: Currently working on

Topic: Feature 2
Short Description: XYZ
State: Open
Interested: Name 2, Name 3

Maybe this can be done by Redmine - thank we can link directly to the Features / Bug List.

Feedback welcome!

Best regards,
Bernhard

–
ATIX - The Linux & Open Source Company

2 Likes
About the RFCs category
#2

Hello,

thanks for bringing this up. I think we should improve this. Perhaps we could spend some time of community demo talking about what’s planned as next steps. For bigger things we tend to use this forum to design out features and get feedback before we start coding, but sometimes we skip it. Especially if the work happens in some plugin. Some time ago there was an idea of doing community redmine triage, maybe that would help? @Gwmngilfen or @Ori_Rabin might have some ideas.

@Bernhard_Suttner how would you share that you are going to work on deb support in Katello or some other cool feature? And would you like to be involved in designing phase or just want to have better progress visibility? The redmine is good to track it from high level perspective, but it’s harder to use it before the feature has clear definition. And since the feature consists of many subissues, it’s hard to keep it up to date and linked to each related change.

–
Marek

#3

Hi,

To work together in the designing phase would be nice, but currently it’s more important for me that I know on which features / changes the community is currently working on. Especially, if there are topics which are on our plate, too. In this case we could also spend some time on coding this new feature, help while testing and discussing about design - of course. Therefore, I would prefer to have a list as I think some others developers may also want to contribute / have some ideas about the design / etc.
Discussing this at the community demo would be an improvement but I prefer to have this in written form so that everyone can follow.

Don’t know if there is a platform to handle this or redmine plugin. I guess it must be something really easy to use so that many are using this way. Therefore it might be the simplest solution to use the wiki.

Best regards,
Bernhard

#4

There once was this kind of idea on the wiki, if you check the wiki index for features you can see some old pages listed there. I think due to observability and discoverability this fell out of fashion.

One idea to think about would be to use the power of discourse to revive the RFC style idea and have a board for posting feature work? This would be visible to the entire community and provide thread style with a top level post. Discourse also provides the ability to attach screenshots, PDFs, and do advanced formatting for presentation of a concept being worked on.

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#5

Additionally, posts can be converted to a a wiki which allows all those interested to make edits. This may or may not be useful, but I mention it so it can stand alongside the Redmine wiki as an option.

Needless to say I’m in favour of trying out Discourse for this (we’re already dependant on it, we may as well go all in :stuck_out_tongue:). Last time, we contrasted Redmine’s wiki capabilities with GitHub’s formatting and history tracking - Discourse appears to offer both. Worth a try?

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#6

I’m fine with trying but IMHO it’s not much about where we store it, but how do we change our workflows so we will start storing it somewhere. I think it would be good to have someone monitoring what’s going on in the community and ask people to share designs/progress. My hope is that after a while, it’d become a standard.

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#7

I’m fine to use Discourse. I would suggest to create a new section in discourse for this so that everyone can follow the discussion and see all items at the first glance.

#8

How about using RedMine trackers for that? Bigger features usually breaks into individual work items (Issues). Here is my effort I am currently working on:

http://projects.theforeman.org/issues/22569

Let me create a separate thread to discuss this. I will link it from the Feature.

#9

I’d say to discussion is better on Discourse. When a feature is fleshed Redmine issue(s) make sense.

1 Like
#10

Huge +1 to this. We’ll all need to be vigilant for things that should be being tracked in such a way. There’s no silver bullet that will solve it for us, it’s just a matter of not assuming someone else will speak up about a particular topic that should be discussed here.

From a technical implementation, there seems to be support for giving this a try on Discourse - that makes sense to me as the discussion platform, while Redmine excels at the tracking of work done. I’ve created a new board (currently called RFCs, but I feel we can do better?). It’s a sub-category of Development, and new topics are wikis by defualt. We could also add a custom field in Redmine to link to specific topics…

Of course, it’s an experiment, so I’ll be happy to modify it as we go.

2 Likes
#11

Thank you Greg. Very appreciated. Great discussion and happy to see this new attempt.

1 Like
#12

Can you move existing RFCs there? Thanks.

#13

Yeah, absolutely. Ran out of time last night, will sort it tonight.

#14

I moved all items tagged rfc to the new category. let me know if I missed something.

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#15

A thing occurred to me. We could add the Solved plugin to the RFC board to indicate something - perhaps that it’s accepted and ready to work on?

Note that for any board using the Solved plugin (currently only Support), you can add ?solved=yes|no to filter the topics, e.g. https://community.theforeman.org/c/support?solved=no - this might also be useful for filtering RFCs in various ways (and yes, I’m trying to see if I can use custom HTML to add buttons for this to the boards :stuck_out_tongue:)

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