2022-12-09 Maintainers' Office Hours Notes

Originally created as a Gather whiteboard.

Attendees:

@Edward Zarecor @Kelly Buchanan @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) @Feanil Patel @Sarina Canelake @Tim Krones @Michelle Philbrick

Agenda

  • Discuss how to get the most leverage from Project Managers working with PRs

  • Public Work Streams

    • PM's role in that

Goals for PR Project Managers

@Tim Krones and @Michelle Philbrick have been piloting a new role and we spent some time trying to specify what the goal of that role should be.

  • Goals for Project Managers:

    • Well maintained repositories by our developing definition -- OEP-55. This goal is shared by all stakeholders.

    • Increase the predictability, consistency, and velocity of pull requests

    • Community support

      • Ensuring that community members' PRs get attention when they don't have existing relationships or access to back-channels

      • Moving from depending on relationships to depending on standards and well-known processes

    • Continuously improving our contribution process

      • Identify and highlight pinch points

      • Remove friction

      • Help identify Maintainer needs

      • Highlight gaps in process/tools/documentation

Existing "Felt Needs"

  • Differentiate between 2U owned repositories from maintained repositories

  • How to make it clear that something is being pulled into sprint

    • Currently: manual steps, won't scale

    • Transparency into progress/status/timing

    • How do PM's interact with this process.

      • NEED: How can they know that something is planned for a future sprint?

        • Currently people put messages in tickets and Michelle just remembers things.

Summary of How We Work Discussion

  • For PRs in maintained repositories, the named maintainers will the point-of-contact for PRPMs.

  • For repositories that are not in the pilot that 2U “own” @Michelle Philbrick and @Tim Krones will reach out to the team name as owners in the 2U document.

  • For cases where there is no or slow response, PMs will work with @Kelly Buchanan and @Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) to get PRs unstuck.

  • We will check in on the back log in a periodic meeting rather than one-off pings.

TODOs

@Edward Zarecor tCRIL will start enabling tests on repos when we have new contributors pending a discussion with the team
@Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) and @Kelly Buchanan will work with the 2U team to find a way for them to have insulation for code merging to the ecommerce repositories.
First deliverable is a date by which this can happen
Second deliverable is making it happen
@Ned Batchelder (Deactivated) will propose language for the ecommerce repositories to clarify that we won’t be expecting/accepting/merging prs as these repositories are deprecated.

Other Notes

  • Managers at 2U may or may not know that there teams are on the hook

  • Not reasonable to treat 2U owners as maintainers

    • This is a risk or a gap

    • What is more formal role that could exist at 2U?

  • Question of how to get eyes on PRs that aren't in formally maintained repositories

  • Two processes?

    • Formal maintainership?

    • Kelly/Ned will act as escalation points for repositories that are not formally maintained until repositories are moved into the maintainership program.

  • TODO: tCRIL will start enabling checks after a cursory review pending a conversation with the tCRIL engineers at

  • Ecommerce can we find a way to allow the community to maintain this

    • Can 2U deploy from someplace other than where they are now?

    • TODO: Action item for 2U -- Ned and Kelly -- will find a way for 2U to deploy this from someplace else so that the community can merge PRs to the ecommerce

      • Ned and Kelly will come back with timing on when they think this can happen.

        • link to DEPR

        • ask for maintainer interest

        • use clear statement about 2U no longer supporting it

        • edx-rest-api-client isn't merging a pr because it would break ecommerce, and somehow the open ecommerce PRs are protecting us