Hello everyone,

Following the last dev call, I'd like to open a discussion around
documentation first approach.

My key observations around Airflow 3.2 development cycle is that in order
to do affective testing I need to understand how a feature designed to
work. While it is listed and explained in AIP page, dev discussions and
possibly in PR description it is not reasonable to expect community users
to go through all of these data points. We have multiple features that are
being developed in parallel so it's huge effort for community members. By
having documentation ready early we help community members to be able to
efficiently test the feature in a real production-like scenario. It will
also help us to gain valuable and early information about if users
understand the feature as we intended. This avoid cases where documentation
lands around/after beta release is cut leaving little time to testing.

Given the AI era, it might even be easier to create and update
documentation as development of the feature progress - it can even make PR
review easier.

The Proposal:

1. The default AIP draft will include a specific entry if the author thinks
it should be under the Documentation first policy. I think it's better to
let authors choose while the community review the choice. It will also
mention by what part of the development documentation should be ready
(before development. by date, by specific milestone, etc...)

2. Community will review it as part of the AIP review.

3. Request to include a feature / AIP under the policy may also come after
AIP was approved if circumstances justify it. This means that any community
member can raise the request. If the AIP author agrees then the AIP page
will be updated accordingly. In the cases where AIP author disagree, the
community member can raise mailing list discussion.

Thanks,
Elad

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