OSPR Brainstorm Meeting notes 04/27/2021

Goal, What does success look like?

• “Small” backlog

  • Few stale PRs

• Increase quarterly merged contributions

  • Increase (or just measure for now?) edx-used contributions

Problems:

• Lead Time

  • OSPR tickets take long, don’t want to pull it into a sprint. 

  • Closing tickets after 2 weeks of no response after edX took weeks to not respond, it was very disappointing tickets.

  • Pulling 5 tickets into a sprint and not being able to close them, waiting for author to respond is frustrating.

• Metrics

  • Also long OSPR resolution times make squad’s metrics look bad.

  • Burn down rate looks bad if sprints have tickets that keep lingering around.

• Authors

  • Imposing rules on authors can be detrimental and seem imposing.

• Squads

  • Squads don’t see OSPRs as priority, however, 60 OSPR per month for all of edX doesn’t seem that much. 

  • Squads feel they have more important things to do than to work on OSPRs

• Tools

  • Is Jira too far away from where the community engages with our code for them to know to look there to find out what’s on our backlogs?  (problem w/r/t alignment on priorities)

Ideas: ⚡️✨

• ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️(edX Buy-in++) How might we connect and prioritize squads with Open edX goals and community?

  • Open edX “buddy system” to establish stronger connections.

  • Can each squad have an engineer who is the OSPR manager for the squad?  (Engineer who can do a decent job of representing other members of the product delivery team (product, ux) and make informed choices about what sort of review is necessary)

  • ✨✨✨Do a consumer review

    • Explain the goals

    • “Why we care and why you should care”

    • What are the metrics

    • Consumer Review: Overview

    • Approach Memo - Template

  • ✨✨Implement means for accountability

    • Standard dashboard to incorporate Eng Ops Review

  • ✨✨Seek more input from other team’s on their impediments, etc.

• ⚡️(Process++) How might we optimize OSPR reviews?

  • Better distribution of OSPRs across teams (not all on T&L).

  • ✨Author should have as much time to respond as edX took.

  • Self-serve OSPR process

• (OSPR API++) How might we clarify expectations of the OSPR process?

  • Could we implement a two sided contract where both edX and author commits to certain respond times.

  • Yelp for contributors - reliable authors with short times get five stars, we review them without fear.

  • ✨✨✨Clarify the different categories of openness for repos

    • Which can lead into different stances toward openness for teams

    • https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/1475084709

• (Roadmap++) How might we externalize edX’s needs to the community?

  • How can we help the community understand what kinds of contributions we consider valuable? (and are thus more likely to review and merge)

    • I keep thinking about this line in our OGSP: “Align with community on valued contributions”

  • How might we use INCR tickets (as Github Issues?) to bring them closer to the code/community, where people might be more likely to see them?

    • Can we get product managers on other teams to use INCR as a mechanism to help their velocity?  If they receive OSPRs for things they asked for then they may be more likely to take them seriously.

  • ✨⚡️How might we create a shared roadmap?

    • technical/architectural to start - start with the domains w/i our control

• How do we measure OSPR outcomes?

  • Better metric would be how much time a ticket was blocked by edX.

Prioritization Techniques:

• See which things we can control ourselves versus requiring things of others.

• Get more data.

  • OSPRs reviewed by core committers?

  • Segmenting stats by committer type?