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