[scikit-learn] Github project management tools

[Andreas Mueller]

Hey Joel.
Thanks for bringing this up. I have a really hard time keeping up with 
what's happening
on the issue tracker and I have no idea how you manage.

The current tags are certainly not always helpful. Also, they are rarely 
updated.

I have been very frustrated by github. I used email to track all issues, 
but their new "upgrade"
made that impossible as issues are no longer email threads - each review 
is it's own thread.

It might make sense to switch to something like reviewable or gerrit.
These sit on top of github, and people can interact with them without 
using them.
I haven't really worked with either, but heard only good things about them.

Any way to prioritize issues and putting them into the buckets that you 
listed would be a great step forward.
That would require someone manually going through 470 PRs and 762 
issues, though.
I would be happy to do that if we actually stick to the system. A single 
person is not enough to keep the tags (or whatever we end up using)
up to date, though.

Your statuses only apply to PRs, too, and we need to have something 
similar for issues, which have maybe these statuses

* random idea / feature request
* feature request with consensus to implement
* possible bug
* confirmed bug
* feature request or bug with active PR
* feature request or bug with stale PR

One problem with these is that man feature requests never get any 
comments, similar for PRs.
Is a PR without comment waiting for review? Or in dispute?
A PR could be reviewed but dispute could happen later, as we don't 
always agree on what to do.

I agree that we should try to organize ourselves better. I'm doubtful 
the new github features will help.
They certainly already have tremendously hindered me in keeping up in 
the couple of hours they've been online.

There is still no way to mark a comment as addressed, and comments are 
still more or less randomly hidden
(and links to them become dead). Both of these issues are fixed in the 
other review platforms.

I don't think we are the intended users of github, though I'm not sure 
who is.


On 09/15/2016 07:14 PM, Joel Nothman wrote:
> One of the biggest issues with scikit-learn as a project is managing 
> its backlog of issues; another is release scheduling. Some of this 
> cannot be fixed as long as our model of voluntary contribution (with a 
> couple of important exceptions) does not change. However, it may be 
> worth considering the new project management features in Github.
>
> At the moment we have the following management:
> * labels corresponding to type (bug, enhancement, new feat, question), 
> scope (API, Build/CI, ?Large Scale, Documentation), difficulty (easy, 
> moderate), status/scheduling (needs contributor, needs review, sprint).
> * PR status management with title prefixes [WIP], [MRG], [MRG+1], [MRG+2]
>
> Firstly, we might benefit from prefixing labels by category, i.e. 
> difficulty:easy so that complementary labels appear together.
>
> In truth, PRs have roughly these statuses:
> * WIP (not ready for review)
> * waiting for review
> * waiting for changes (with or without one of the following)
> * in dispute (i.e. fundamental doubts about the PR)
> * the above together with 1 or 2 "official" approvals
> * ready for merge (pending minor changes such as what's new documentation)
>
> New github features:
>
> * reviews with "approved" or "request changes". A list of approvers 
> can be found in the merge/CI panel. We could replace the MRG+1 
> annotation with this and use it to track disputation too. I'm not sure 
> how it works with changes that are added after approval. I think it 
> would have avoided one improper merge by me... One downside is that 
> there does not yet seem to be a way to search for PRs with a specified 
> level of approval (while searching for "MRG+1" sort-of works).
> * Milestone prioritising: issues in a milestone, such as 
> https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/milestone/21, can be 
> ranked with drag-and-drop. I think this could help with release 
> scheduling as it would allow us to identify the top priorities for a 
> release and see when enough of them are completed.
> * The Kanban-style workflow management of the new Projects tool 
> https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn/projects is another way 
> of managing status and, I think, priority, for a small set of related 
> issues. This might be an alternative way of managing milestone scope, 
> or of working towards big changes like the one just completed for 
> model selection; like proposed expansions to get_feature_names 
> expansion; like estimator tags; making utilities public/private...
>
> So with the goal of making it easier to track where attention is most 
> needed, and when to move to release: What's worth trying?
>
>
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