
Make tasks related to milestones, and associate milestones to the actual *branches*. That's an elegant way to solve our need to track "backport to milestone-proposed" tasks, solving an old issue we had in Launchpad (and for which we were abusing "Fixreleased"). Each milestone is associated to a branch. There are three types of branches: master (the future), release (the milestone-proposed branch, when it's around), and stable/*. Milestones are mandatory, there is a default 'undefined' milestone for when we don't really know when that work will hit in the master branch. In normal times we'd have the following unreleased milestones: master branch -> undefined, havana-1, havana-2, havana-3 stable/grizzly branch -> 2013.1.3 When the milestone-proposed branch is created just before havana-1, we move the havana-1 milestone from master to release branch: master branch -> undefined, havana-2, havana-3 release branch -> havana-1 stable/grizzly branch -> 2013.1.3 That lets us track release-backporting tasks (targeted to release/havana-1) separately from normal work (targeted to master/*). At the final release, the release branch is just renamed to stable/* and a new release branch is created for the new cycle. Change-Id: Ia212ae9c40549fe484362cbd5b3f323a467edb76
4.3 KiB
StoryBoard - A task tracking system for inter-related projects
StoryBoard is the Django app (leveraging Bootstrap at the presentation layer) for task tracking across inter-related projects. It is meant to be suitable for OpenStack task tracking.
Features
At this stage, StoryBoard is just a proof-of-concept to see if it's worth investing more into developing it.
Current features
- Bug tracking
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Like Launchpad Bugs, StoryBoard implements bugs as stories, with tasks that may affect various project/branch combinations. You can currently create bugs, tasks for bugs, edit their status, comment on them, etc. The current POC is incomplete: it does not do any sort of form client-side validation, and is missing search features, pagination, results ordering. This should definitely be improved if we go forward with this.
- Project views
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Basic project views that let you retrieve the list of tasks for a given project, as well as an example of a workflow-oriented view (the 'Triage bugs' view). The current POC is is also just a minimal stub of the project view feature set.
- Markdown descriptions and comments
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Story descriptions and comments can use markdown for richer interaction.
Questionable features
Some current design choices are questionable and open to discussion:
- Priority is set for the whole story
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Instead of each task having their own priority, the story itself has a priority. It makes triaging easier, however we may want to be able to have tasks with various priorities within a single story...
- No invalid/wontfix/opinion status
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We delete tasks rather than marking them invalid. On the benefits side, that means there is only one way to do it, on the drawbacks side you have to look into history to see if a given project task was considered and abandoned...
Future features
- Feature tracking
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The equivalent of Launchpad Blueprints, they inherit the same 'story' framework as bugs. That means they don't have most of the limitations of LP blueprints: you can comment in them, you can have tasks affecting multiple projects, you can even have multiple tasks affecting the same project and order them !
- Project groups
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Projects can be grouped together arbitrarily, and all 'project' views can be reused by project groups. That makes it easy to triage or track all tasks for projects within a given OpenStack program.
- Subscription
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Users should be able to subscribe to tasks (and get them in a specific view) as well as subscribe to projects (have their own customized project group). This lets you easily get customized views for the stuff that happens to matters to you, personally.
- Gerrit integration
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StoryBoard should reuse the projects and groups defined for Gerrit. It should reflect merges with deeper integration than with LP... potentially forcing a 1:1 relationship between tasks and merges (one merge = one task marked 'Landed')
- Development cycle tracking
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A new tab for StoryBoard, giving you per-cycle and per-milestone views of progress. Would replace the need for status.o.o/releasestatus. Cycles and milestones could be specified per project, although having a default, common set would avoid duplication (and allow cross-project milestone views).
See https://github.com/ttx/storyboard/issues for more feature backlog.
Install, test and run
Prerequisites
- You'll need the following Python modules installed:
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- django (1.4+)
- django-openid-auth
- markdown
- python-openid
You can get them by running:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Configuration and DB creation
Copy storyboard/local_settings.py.sample to storyboard/local_settings.py and change settings there.
Create empty database, create default admin user: ./manage.py syncdb
Basic test using Django development server
Run Django development server: ./manage.py runserver
Create basic data (at least a master and release branch, a milestone, a project) through the admin server (using the admin credentials above) at: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/
Then log out and access the application at: http://127.0.0.1:8000/