Enhancements Tracking and Backlog

Enhancement tracking repository for OpenShift, including OKD and OCP.

Inspired by the Kubernetes enhancement process.

This repository provides a rally point to discuss, debate, and reach consensus for how OpenShift enhancements are introduced. OpenShift combines Kubernetes container orchestration services with a broad set of ecosystem components in order to provide an enterprise ready Kubernetes distribution built for extension. OpenShift assembles innovation across a wide array of repositories and upstream communities. Given the breadth of the distribution, it is useful to have a centralized place to describe OpenShift enhancements via an actionable design proposal.

Enhancements may take multiple releases to ultimately complete and thus provide the basis of a community roadmap. Enhancements may be filed from anyone in the community, but require consensus from domain specific project maintainers in order to implement and accept into the release.

For an overview of the whole project, see the roadmap.

For a quick-start, FAQ, and template references, see the guidelines.

Why are Enhancements Tracked?

As the project evolves, its important that the OpenShift community understands how we build, test, and document our work. Individually it is hard to understand how all parts of the system interact, but as a community we can lean on each other to build the right design and approach before getting too deep into an implementation.

Is My Thing an Enhancement?

A rough heuristic for an enhancement is anything that:

• impacts how a cluster is operated including addition or removal of significant capabilities
• impacts upgrade/downgrade
• needs significant effort to complete
• requires consensus/code across multiple domains/repositories
• proposes adding a new user-facing component
• has phases of maturity (Dev Preview, Tech Preview, GA)
• demands formal documentation to utilize

It is unlikely to require an enhancement if it:

• fixes a bug
• adds more testing
• internally refactors a code or component only visible to that components domain
• minimal impact to distribution as a whole

If you are not sure if the proposed work requires an enhancement, file an issue and ask!

When to Create a New Enhancement

Enhancements should be related to work to be implemented in the near future. If you have an idea, but aren't planning to implement it right away, the conversation should start somewhere else like the mailing list or Slack.

Create an enhancement here once you:

• have circulated your idea to see if there is interest
• (optionally) have done a prototype in your own fork
• have identified people who agree to work on and maintain the enhancement
  • many enhancements will take several releases to complete

Although you should probably not start your new idea's journey by writing an enhancement up front, it's worth perusing the enhancement template to understand the kinds of details that will ultimately be required, so you can keep them in mind as you explore your new idea.

How are Enhancements Reviewed and Approved?

The author of an enhancement is responsible for managing it through the review and approval process, including soliciting feedback on the pull request and in meetings, if necessary.

Each enhancement should have at least one "approver" and several reviewers designated in the header of the document.

The approver assists authors who may not be familiar with the process, the project, or the maintainers. They may provide advice about who should review a specific proposal and point out deadlines or other time-based criteria for completing work. The approver is responsible for recognizing when consensus among reviewers has been reached so that a proposal is ready to be approved, or formally rejected. In cases where consensus is not emerging on its own, the approver may also step in as a mediator. The approver does not need to be a subject-matter expert for the subject of the design, although it can help if they are.

Choosing the appropriate approver depends on the scope of an enhancement. If it is limited in scope to a given team or component, then a peer or lead on that team or pillar is appropriate. If an enhancement captures something more broad in scope, then a member of the OpenShift staff engineers team or someone they delegate would be appropriate. Examples of broad scope are proposals that change the definition of OpenShift in some way, add a new required dependency, or change the way customers are supported. Use your best judgement to determine the level of approval needed. If you’re not sure, ask a staff engineer to help find a good approver by posting in #forum-arch on the RedHat Slack server and tagging @aos-staff-engineers. If you are external to RedHat, you can use the #openshift-users forum on the kubernetes.slack.com instance.

The set of reviewers for an enhancement proposal can be anyone that has an interest in this work or the expertise to provide a useful input/assessment. At a minimum, the reviewers must include a representative of any team that will need to do work for this EP, or whose team will own/support the resulting implementation. Be mindful of the workload of reviewers, however, and the challenge of finding consensus as the group of reviewers grows larger. Clearly indicating what aspect of the EP you expect each reviewer to be concerned with will allow them to focus their reviews.

How Can an Author Help Speed Up the Review Process?

Enhancements should have agreement from all stakeholders prior to being approved and merged. Reviews are not time-boxed (see Life-cycle below). We manage the rate of churn in OpenShift by asking component maintainers to act as reviewers in addition to everything else that they do. If it is not possible to attract the attention of enough of the right maintainers to act as reviewers, that is a signal that the project's rate of change is maxed out. With that said, there are a few things that authors can do to help keep the conversation moving along.

1. Respond to comments quickly, so that a reviewer can tell you are engaged.
2. Push update patches, rather than force-pushing a replacement, to make it easier for reviewers to see what you have changed. Use descriptive commit messages on those updates, or plan to use /label tide/merge-method-squash to have them squashed when the pull request merges.
3. Do not rely solely on the enhancement for visibility of the proposal. For high priority work, or if the conversation stalls out, you can start a thread in #forum-arch on the CoreOS Slack server or bring the enhancement to one of the weekly architecture review meetings for discussion. If you aren't sure which meeting to use, work with a staff engineer to find a good fit.
4. If the conversation otherwise seems stuck, pinging reviewers on Slack can be used to remind them to look at updates. It's generally appropriate to give people at least a business day or two to respond in the GitHub thread first, before reaching out to them directly on Slack, so that they can manage their work queue and disruptions.

Using Labels

The following labels may be applied to enhancements to help categorize them:

• priority/important-soon indicates that the enhancement is related to a top level release priority. These will be highlighted in the this-week newsletters.

Life-cycle

Pull requests to this repository should be short-lived and merged as soon as there is consensus. Therefore, the normal life-cycle timeouts are shorter than for most of our code repositories.

Pull requests being actively discussed will stay open indefinitely. Inactive pull requests will automatically have the life-cycle/stale label applied after 28 days. Removing the life-cycle label will reset the clock. After 7 days, stale pull requests are updated to life-cycle/rotten. After another 7 days, rotten pull requests are closed.

Ideally pull requests with enhancement proposals will be merged before significant coding work begins, since this avoids having to rework the implementation if the design changes as well as arguing in favor of accepting a design simply because it is already implemented.

Template Updates

From time to time the template for enhancement proposals is modified as we refine our processes. When that happens, open pull requests may start failing the linter job that ensures that all documents include the required sections.

If you are working on an enhancement and the linter job fails because of changes to the template (not other issues with the markdown formatting), handle it based on the maturity of the enhancement pull request:

• If the only reason to update your pull request is to make the linter job accept it after a template change and there are no substantive content changes needed for approval, override the job to allow the pull request to merge.
• If your enhancement is still a draft, and consensus hasn't been reached, modify the pull request so the new enhancement matches the updated template.
• If you are updating an existing (merged) document, go ahead and override the job.