Task board

[Emmanuelle Gouillart]

Hi Stéfan,

thanks for continuing the discussion on this important subject. I would
reformulate your two points as 1) social aspects/community management and
2) technical tools and processes. 

In my opinion, we need a little bit of both. Dashboards can be useful if
they save time and provide meaningful information that would be painful
to retrieve otherwise. One should nevertheless be wary of too many
metrics and quantitative indices (a problem that cripples the
creativity of scientific research!): it is sometimes very tempting to
merge two small PRs instead of spending time on a single difficult one.

I don't have much to say about the 2nd point since I don't know the tool.
For the 1st point, here are some ideas and suggestions from the top of my
head
- assigning / self-assigning PRs might be a good idea, as Juan suggested
- when a PR is stalling and the contributor is not responding, we should
  either take over if possible, or close it after some warnings.
- keeping a good balance between the number of active contributors and
active reviewers is hard. Recently several people have contributed
several PRs, demonstrating an expertise in some domain of image
processing. Maybe we should ask them whether they would be willing to
review PRs and be more active in including these persons. 
- in the core team, maybe we should say more explicitely when we are or
  are not available (announce it somewhere? have a google calendar?). I
know that there are periods of time where I can't spend any time on
scikit-image, it can be weeks or even months. If the rest of the team
had such information for every core member, it would save time
because someone else could try to take over. We could also have pairs of
people with similar expertise (segmentation, computer vision,
architecture, etc.), who could work in pairs and replace the other person
when one is not available.
- we could take turns to be in charge of checking the global advance of
PRs. It's a pain of a job, but if it's one week every two months it's
not so bad.

Here are my 2 cents. I think it's a question of focussing our resources
better, and maybe empowering new people, because I'm not sure we can
spend much more time on the reviewing process.

Cheers,
Emma

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 01:17:48PM -0700, Stefan van der Walt wrote:
> Hi, everyone

> As Juan mentioned recently, it's becoming harder to keep track of the
> motion of the project as a whole.  Sometimes, tickets lounge unattended
> for an unacceptable long time.

> I can think of two main routes for improving the situation:

> 1) Improve our team structure, so that individuals take responsibility
> for moving certain aspects of the project forward. 
> 2) Processes / systems to help us get a grasp on the current state of
> things

> I have some ideas around (1) that need fleshing out, but in the mean
> time I was looking at http://zube.io to address part of (2).

> Do you have any experience with this system?  Zube can be compared
> against HuBoard, gh-board, and ZenHub.  A test scikit-image board is
> here: https://zube.io/projects/4670/kanban  (it's vanilla, I haven't
> done anything with it yet)

> Let me hear your thoughts.

> Stéfan