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ProductTeam

OpenStack Product Working Group

Meeting and Communication Information

Date, time, and IRC channel: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/#OpenStack_Product_WG
Past IRC meeting logs: http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/meetings/product_working_group/
Etherpad archives: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/PWG_Archives
Subscribe to the User Committee Mailing List
Please add [Product] tag in the subject line when sending messages to the User Committee Mailing List
Product WG Mailing List Archives (archive of messages sent prior to Jan. 4th, 2017)

Ocata Cycle Priorities

  • Establish simplified process for Development Proposal (formerly known as "user-story") creation, review and analysis to enable all Work Groups/Teams to contribute and enable a wider range of feedback.
  • Complete the Development Proposal Tracker
    • Lead: Jamey
  • Support the Community transitions: Redesigned work flow and User Committee expansion
    • Lead: Leong


Ocata Midcycle Planning etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/MIL-pwg-meetup

Mission

We will support the OpenStack developer community in their desire to build open-source cloud software that reflects the needs of the various markets adopting the platform by creating Development Proposals (formerly known as "user stories") that reflect the voice of the end-users/operators. These Development Proposals will focus on items that have traditionally been harder to implement based on the need for cross-project coordination and significant development time (spanning multiple releases). Finally, the team will also focus on sharing regular updates on directional insights for the platform (gathered from key members from the development community) in the form of a multi-release roadmap. The ultimate mission is to create a focus on areas that are high-impact and remove barriers to adoption/operation/scale of OpenStack clouds.

Who we are

The product working group consists of product managers, technologists, and operators from a diverse set of organizations. The group is working to aggregate Development Proposals from the market-focused teams (Enterprise, Telco, etc.) and cross-project functional teams (e.g. logging, upgrades, etc.), partner with the development community on resourcing, and help gather data to generate a multi-release roadmap. Most of the Development Proposals being tracked by this team consists of items that can span multiple releases and usually have cross-project dependencies.

The group aims to **improve the quality of the delivery process, the delivered product, and the product experience for operators and end users**.

Objectives

The objectives of this working group, based on the mission, are therefore to:

Collect Feedback and Aggregate Requirements

This group will collect (and aggregate) user, admin, customer, and operator requirements. The group should also interface with and gather data from, the other groups collecting requirements for specific verticals, markets, or user segments (e.g. Operators, Enterprise, Personas, NFV/Telco, End Users/App Developers, etc.)

Development Proposals Planning, Prioritization, and Development

Develop a repeatable, transparent, process for prioritization of Development Proposals; create blueprints/specs (or bug report) associated with the Development Proposal on a per-release cycle basis. The team will work within their organizations to fill any necessary resource gaps and create a tracker to track the implementation progress of the Development Proposal across projects and multiple releases. The criteria for the process along with the results should be clearly communicated with the community and our end-customers.

Multi-release Roadmap

Generate a multi-release roadmap based on the aggregated data and resulting themes/requirements. The roadmap will be socialized, transparently, to community stakeholders for agreement and approval. After a roadmap has been established/approved, the OpenStack community will be notified of the results, the drivers for the decision, and its impact over multiple releases to consumers (and developers) of the platform.

Methodology

The team requires establishing a workflow, identifying stakeholders/partners in the community, providing a means to track progress against Development Proposals, and ensuring routine interlocks with other members/groups in the community due to the wide spectrum of items being worked on concurrently. The Product WG has established sub-teams/roles to divide tasks to ensure quality and timeliness of our collective output.

Glossary

  • Development Proposal: a Development Proposal consists of
    • Problem overview: describing the problem that this proposal to aims to resolve
    • Opportunity/Justification: user segments that need this functionality and the impact of them not having it
    • Requirement Specifications
      • Use cases: agile user stories, i.e. a short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or customer of the system. Use cases follow the template: As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>.
      • Usage scenarios: examples that show how the feature would be used if it existed; usage scenarios can be translated to test cases.
      • Related Proposal
      • Requirements
      • External References
      • Rejected Proposals
      • Glossary: list of terms specific to the Development Proposal

Templates

Available templates for Development Proposals:

Sub-Teams / Roles

Roadmap Release Team

The roadmap release team consists of CPLs and other members of the Product WG. This team has a dedicated sub-page which includes more information.

Product WG Cross Project Liaisons

OpenStack uses a concept called Cross Project Liaisons to facilitate communications between projects that might require collaboration/coordination with each other. The cross-project liaisons representing a certain team will co-locate with another team to become participating members and serve as the conduit between the two project teams. You can find a list of the Product WG CPLs here: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons#Product_Working_Group

Development Proposal Owners

The Development Proposal Owners are members of the Product WG team who have volunteered to help manage/lead/track a Development Proposal from submission to completion. They will also help with the decomposition of the Development Proposal into blueprints/specs, gather resources to aid with authoring/completing blueprints/specs, and work with the CPLs to ensure the "big picture"/objective associated with the Development Proposal is being taken into account since Development Proposals will often include multiple "moving parts" in a single release and require tracking across releases.

Development Proposal are stored/tracked using the development-proposals repo and the specs page.

OpenStack Development Proposals Core Members

The members of the openstack-user-stories-core team carefully review all changes proposed to the openstack-user-story repository (which is where the Product WG stores Development Proposals and tracking data). The responsibilities, expectations, and process for membership in the openstack-user-stores-core team can be found here.

Feature Tracker Project Team

The Feature Tracker is a tool key to the PWG lifecucle though also useful for tracking other items across projects and releases. There is a development team who own and maintain it. See details of meetings and communication at: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ProductTeam/FeatureTracker

Series of Activities per Release

In conclusion, to achieve the various objectives, the Product WG will pursue multiple activities throughout each release. The chart below attempts to map these activities on top of the standard 6-month release schedule for OpenStack releases.

FAQs

The Product WG has compiled a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

Pwgactivities.png

Product WG Pilot Phase

This section covers key items that we will work on to integrate the Product team with other teams; PTLs, TC, and other User Committee working groups.

☑ Form a draft workflow for Development Proposals planning and prioritization
☑ Present initial multi-release roadmap at the Liberty summit
☑ Review Development Proposals being pursued during the pilot with the Cross Project team [meeting log]
✅ Conduct gaps analysis, partner with developers, and present specs/blueprints in project meetings
✅ Build Development Proposal tracker and share with community
✅ Engage in operator and design summit sessions to gather and share feedback, respectively
✅ At the Tokyo summit, present the multi-release direction for L through N releases

Sub-Pages