Skip to main content

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
Re: [che-dev] Remove regular team updates within Community meeting

Hello,

On 11/10/20 4:40 PM, Artem Zatsarynnyi wrote:
Hello folks,

Last Che Community meeting I've raised a topic to discuss the usefulness of the regular updates given by the teams involved in Che development. As there were different opinions and we weren't able to achieve a consensus on the subject, I decided to continue discussing it offline.

A bit of background for those who weren't able to attend the latest meeting or not attending it on a regular basis:

    usually, at the end of every Che Community meeting, Red Hat team
    leads give an update
    on the teams' work done during the past week and what is planned for
    the current week.
    First, it's prepared in a written form in every Che Community
    meeting document, e.g. [1]
    and then every team lead is retelling it, one by one.
    As you see, in 99% these updates look like a list of the issues'
    titles given from GitHub with the links attached.
    Actualy it represents nothing more than just the sprints issues that
    are publicly available on GitHub for everyone.


So, I expressed my doubts if we really need such a regular part of our Community meeting.
Does it really make sense of preparing it and giving it during every call?
During the call, I proposed to remove this part. Some people are sharing this opinion with me. Some people were against that. As I remember, there were suggestions to convert it to a different form, e.g.:
- provide the written updates weekly to the community chat
- make it convenient to see on GitHub (maybe labeling the sprint issues with the "current-sprint" label and posting a GitHub query somewhere?)

In this follow-up thread, I want to ask the Community if someone would find it helpful to get such info about the current Che work? Or being able to get information related to the interesting area from GitHub, by tracking the issues/PRs, is completely enough?


I'm not sure how much of a community response you'll get, considering we have ~3 consistently active community members.

I don't think we should be doing community team updates to begin with. The whole concept of a "team" is a totally Red Hat centric one, where Red Hatters are doing 95% (or more) of the work. Imagine we had 50% of the work done by community contributors (a goal we should aspire to achieve), and 50% done by Red Hatters. Would it make sense to have individual community contributors post updates every week? No.

Furthermore a "team update" is only so useful when those writing the updates are doing the work. As soon as some percentage of the work is done by those in the community the report becomes inaccurate because it doesn't show the whole picture. I don't write about non-RH committers' PRs in my team updates and I don't plan on doing so either.

We have more than enough publicly available metadata to track work in the various Che repos, to the point where it's not unreasonable to ask community members to find the information themselves. Some examples include:
* Area labels
* Release milestones
* Subscribing to repos they are interested in seeing activity in
* Following users whose contributions they are interested in

We can make this process easier by outlining in the Che README:
* GitHub queries to see the issues for each relevant subject area
* Links to the relevant repo for each subject area

There are also the public mattermost channels where anyone is free to ask any question.

There also seem to be some internal RH people (who are not responsible for writing these reports, by the way) looking for team updates. In addition to the public information described above, interested internal onlookers can also:
* Attend the standup call of any team
* Attend the sprint planning/prioritization call of any team
* Lurk in any team's internal/external chat channels
* Reach out to team leads for status updates on specific items of interest

As far as copying the SoS report goes, well that's not quite as simple. The SoS report is an internal reporting tool for Red Hat management, and contains information about CRW as well as Red Hat confidential details. It's not a question of dumping a copy of the SoS report somewhere, because often such a report would need reviewing and tweaking.

I suggest we make the improvements to the Che README as outlined above, and stop doing the team updates all together. The community call will then be topic based, with no agenda topics resulting in a short call, or no call at all.


Eric





Back to the top