openstack-doc-core team mailing list archive

[Lana Brindley <openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi core team,

One of the things that came up as a pain point at Summit was the DocImpact automation. I’ve been doing some thinking about this, and this is where I’m at right now:

Workflow: Devs create a patch, and at commit time they think "oh yeah, probably there should be some docs about that" and whack in a 'DocImpact' flag. In other words, there's not a lot of thought going in here, it's just an easy thing to do, they get a warm fuzzy, and there’s an assumption that the documentation fairy comes along and takes care of things. In reality, what then happens is some docs triager spends an hour looking at the patch, searching through the docs, then deciding it has nothing to do with openstack-manuals. Often, the actual doc impact (if there even is one) is against docs in the dev repo, not openstack-manuals.

In short, devs recognise they need docs, and DocImpact is an easy way to feel like they're doing something productive to make that happen. What really happens is that those bugs are largely irrelevant for openstack-manuals, which puts pressure on our core team to triage them effectively. To try and get some perspective on the size of the problem, here are some numbers:

Of the 508 current openstack-manuals bugs, 214 are the result of the DocImpact script. 51 of these are yet to be triaged.
Right now, there are 170 patches in-flight with the DocImpact tag. To state the obvious, if all them land, that’s 170 new bugs in our queue.

So, solutions:

1: We have a crack team of docs people (potentially with automation assistance) going through docimpact bugs, cc'ing the original patch authors, and moving them into dev repos where necessarily, and marking the rest invalid. We could team this with a an education campaign on the dev mailing list.

2: We ditch docimpact, and force devs to create their own docs bugs (and patches). This would mean fewer devs get on with the job of documentation, but at least what we do get would be well-considered, rather than hastily added to their commit message.

3: We adjust docimpact to raise a bug in their own dev repo. So, patch against swift with docimpact raises a bug in the swift bug queue, not the openstack-manuals doc queue. Maintenance overhead then remains with dev, and I bet you any money they would self-police that better than we ever could.

4: Some other thing I haven’t thought of yet … ?

I have a feeling 3 is where the money's at. I took the liberty of quickly checking with an Infra core, and this change should be relatively easy to implement, too, for the record.

Thoughts?

Lana

Lana Brindley
Technical Writer
Rackspace Cloud Builders Australia

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