Deprecation Working Group Kickoff Meeting (2018-10-09)

Agenda

• Introduction to group
• Discuss known areas for deprecation
• Discuss strategies for tackling and managing debt
• What do we want from this group?
  
  • How often do we want to meet?
  • What future topics would we like to discuss?
  • How do ensure that our decisions are actionable?
  • How do we track progress of the group?

Notes

• Our code that is marked deprecated already
  • Using Python's built-in deprecation warnings
    • https://docs.python.org/2/library/exceptions.html#exceptions.DeprecationWarning 
  • How can we focus on removing this so that we can see Django's deprecation warnings
    
    • Jenkins can't handle that many deprecation warnings (mostly)
  • Count the number of deprecation warnings and ensure that the number only ever go down.
    • TE-2788 - Getting issue details... STATUS
• Bad imports preventing us from removing sys.path nonsense
• Advocate usage of the OEP and propose changes when the process described is not useful
  • https://github.com/edx/open-edx-proposals/blob/master/oeps/oep-0021-proc-deprecation.rst
• Adding dates to the DeprecationWarning to indicate when we expect things to no longer work
• Organizational focus on eliminating warnings
• Bubbling up dates into code/tickets so that product can respond
• Keep track of deprecation tickets that will impact the next release
  • Could be wiki page, could be Jira filter
• Examples of situations:
  • Dynamic Pacing
    • We will deliver the feature
    • Engineering work needs to happen as part of delivering the feature before we can move onto other projects
• Percentage of engineering time dedicated to it
  • Dedicate a day or two to engineering work per sprint
• Escalation teams - can they take on debt work?

Future Discussions

• How do we deprecate features?
• Getting product buy-in?
  • Notifier, as an example
• Presenting to the engineering org about successes
• Figure out how much time we are spending right now on tech debt
  • Increase that number?
  • Are we doing enough?
• Focus on removing pylint and deprecation warnings
• IOUs
  • when introducing tech debt, keep track of the new things that are added
• Track engineering pain points
  • Course Modes
  • access
• Questions of ownership?
  • Guilds - how are they working?

Diana Huang - schedule a meeting to go through the list and update information on them