On 01/13/2011 03:49 PM, Robbie Gemmell wrote:
I would like to see the existing toolset used properly before we think about bringing another process into use, specifically JIRA. Having recently undertaken the Release Manager role I now more fully appreciate the pain those who have undertaken the process in the past have gone through in this area.
We certainly do need to better manage JIRA, I agree with you completely there. However I think the QIP idea can actually assist in that and complement it.
Every agreed QIP would result in at least one JIRA. Having a template that provides some standard structure in which the proposal addresses some key questions and having some discussion around the proposal on list[1] would in my view improve the quality of those JIRAs as well.
[1] JIRA email traffic generates a lot of noise and I have it all redirected to a folder (I doubt I am alone in this).
JIRA is there to allow tracking issues and the related changes to the code base, however at present JIRAs often aren't created at all, or are simply created and then never updated/referenced. Just taking a quick look back through recent commits, the vast majority don't specify a JIRA in the commit log. If these actually have an associated JIRA and it isn't sitting in the resolved state then how is anyone looking at it meant to know whether it has actually been worked on? If it was worked on then how is anyone interested (user or developer) meant to know what changes were actually made in order to fix/implement it? If there was a deep and meanigful discussion about a change on a JIRA, how is someone meant to find it and vice versa? Alternatively, if no JIRA at all was created how are people meant to find out a problem was even fixed / feature added etc without searching through the commits and knowing what to look for? Not updating a JIRA to say its in progress / resolved / reopened etc is one thing, but making it unnecessarily difficult / impossible for anyone else to do so is another. Thanks to some additional prodding from Justin I did actually get some help with the process eventually for 0.8, but with those JIRAs I had to tidy up myself it took a lot more work than it should have. I'm also sure there will be JIRAs that have been pushed out to the next version during the release cycles but have actually been actioned already, except it wasn't possible for anyone to tell 6 months later. I realise there are changes where it sometimes doesn't seem necessary to make a JIRA (e.g. add a comment, correct a typo, update a readme, etc) and I will admit to doing a commit without one on occasion, but that is the vast minority of the time and should not be the norm for anyone. Ideally we should just have a JIRA for everything, but we are so bad at this as a community I would actually say we should have a commit hook put in place to enforce presence of a JIRA tag in commit logs to encourage the behaviour.
I would rather start complaining about specific commits which should have had a Jira referenced and do not - the 'name and shame' approach!
Automated enforcement of this sort can sometimes enforce the letter of the law without really doing much for its spirit.
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