launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Maris Fogels <maris.fogels@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/23/2010 12:19 AM, Martin Pool wrote:
> I just noticed today there's something like 40 approved ready-to-land
> reviews on <https://code.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad/+activereviews>,
> with about 10 over a month old.  It seems like a lot.... Why do you
> suppose they sit there for so long?
> 

Pure speculation here, but I think that it is partly a side-effect of
distributed development: you can not easily see where the work is, or where
undelivered work has built up.  We don't see or count the unmerged branches
every day (no one person does), and the system, people, and process do not warn
us when too much undelivered work has built up.

A pet project of mine is to deliver a tray application for the Gnome desktop
that shows red, green, and yellow status lights for each station in our
development process: PQM, EC2, buildbot, QA, etc.  A developer running the tray
app can see right away when something has mucked up, be that in their own EC2
instance, a buildbot builder fail, or stale QA.  It is modeled after a Japanese
system called Andon.

You could double-up the Andon system to warn you about the amount of undelivered
code at each stage of development:

  Unlanded: xxxxxxxxxxxx
  PQM:               xxx
  Buildbot:           xx
  QA:             xxxxxx
  Undeployed:   xxxxxxxx


You can also set up an Andon warning (a traffic light) if levels get too high.
(You need the tray warning because unlike in a factory, where everyone can see
the inventory stack is too high, your desktop doesn't have the screen space to
use a visual metaphor.)


-- 
Māris Fogels -- https://launchpad.net/~mars
Launchpad.net -- cross-project collaboration and hosting

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