launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have an experiment to propose - I can put this on the wiki, but I'd
like to get some feedback and discussion first.

The way we use Launchpad has been discussed before, and I'd like to
stress that I'm not proposing this experiment *because Launchpad has a
different model*. Rather I'm proposing it because I believe the current
partitioning of bugs is harmful to our team responsibility - it drives
the need to do things like action groups to work on tasks, because tasks
are not globally visible to the whole team by default.

I've run this up the flagpole with Jml and Martin already, and they both
thought it would be an interesting experiment to run.


Executive summary
-----------------

Run an experiment where we work with our bugs on a single project rather
than spread across 20-odd projects. If we don't like it, put the bug
tasks back where they came from after the experiment. If we do like it,
keep them on the single project :).

The experiment would be a success if it becomes easier to see the
overall launchpad bug priorities / more awareness of other subteam
priorities and issues.

Why?
----

Launchpad isn't as polished or powerful at the project group level as it
is at a per project level. By partitioning our bugs across many projects
we partition our knowledge about what needs to be done and thus we
fragment our team responsibility into pieces.

Is it feasible?
---------------

Launchpad-project has 5800 bugs, and ~30 developers, or about 19 bugs
per developer. bzr (core, not plugins) has 1800 bugs, and <10 developers
developers, or about 18 bugs per developer. bzr hasn't split its bug
database and the developers manage to get things done quite
successfully :)

Why Not?
--------

Perhaps Launchpad isn't a good enough bug tracker to work with 5800 bugs
in a single product? (perhaps - lets find out, experiments are
[relatively] cheap). However, scale wise there isn't much difference
between 1800 and 5800 - they are both much more than a single page :),
and I can tell you that Launchpad works quite ok for 1800 bugs.

How?
----

A small script given the projects we want to consolidate can:
 - output a list of bugtask, original_project to allow reversing the
experiment.
 - generate SQL to move those bugtasks to launchpad (if we want to avoid
bugmail), or just do the move directly.

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