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

• 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?

• 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.

    • https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/TE-2788

• 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?

• 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