linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Michael Hope <michael.hope@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 4:16 AM, Mounir Bsaibes
<mounir.bsaibes@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:07:04AM -0500, Mounir Bsaibes wrote:
>> > > So my question stands: we don't control upstream and can't assign a
>> > > blueprint to a monthly milestone as we don't have control over when it
>> > > will actually land.  How should this be handled?
>> >
>> > Should we have another milestone called 'Upstream' for example? (This
>> > milestone would be a place holder milestone similar to the 'Backlog'
>> > milestone)
>>
>> Conceptually, I think this is a bit bogus. Backlog is an accurate
>> indication of the scheduling of an unstarted blueprint or bug (i.e. its
>> milestone is unknown), whereas a task which is already being worked on
>> has context around it, which would be lost if you just retargeted the
>> task to upstream.
>>
>> And besides, don't you want engineers to want to get better at
>> predicting when their work will be accepted?
>
>  yes - absolutely.
>>
>> I get the argument that
>> upstreaming code is hard to predict, but it is definitely not /totally/
>> chaotic and unpredictable -- if the patch concpt is sane then it's a
>> number of interations and then hitting a merge window. There's something
>> of a rhythm to it. It shouldn't take multiple months for most patches to
>> be accepted, and epic patches (see CMA) should be specially planned for.
>
>
> An alternative flow can be as follows:
> 1. When a developer comes free, they pick the next best blueprint
>  2. They assign it to themselves, remove the 'backlog' milestone, target it
> to a milestone based on an educated guess and learned experience, and
> mark it as 'Started'

That's fine, but previously we've said that if you target something to
a milestone then you *must not* miss that milestone.  If we relax that
then I'm OK with doing it based on an educated guess.

-- Michael