Workflow

Where Feature/Improvements Come From

Feature or improvement ideas typically start from a few ways:

• User feedback collected by the product working group.
• IRC or Mailing list discussion.
• A patch within a project that’s recognized as benefiting other projects.

How to Propose Feature/Improvements in OpenStack

Blueprints

To formally propose a feature or improvement to an OpenStack project, you need to create a Blueprint. Blueprints allow the community to track initiatives and potentially mark them to a milestone in a release being developed. Some of the information tracked is who is implementing it, current progress, and more

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Project Specifications

Some projects go a step further with blueprints and ask for a set of information up front to know whether a certain initiative is a good idea. This set of information can be technical information such as:

• Application Programming Interface (API) impact
• Database impact
• Upgrade impact
• User impact

Specification information is not standard across the different OpenStack projects, but you can see if a project does specifications by going to https://github.com/openstack/<project>-specs and find their template file to see what questions you need to answer.

Keep in mind not all ideas need a specification, so find out from the project members if a certain idea warrants a full spec, or just a blueprint.

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Cross-Project Specifications

If an idea spans to more than one project, it should be introduced in the OpenStack Specs repo instead a project specific Specification.

Each project that is involved with the specification should have a blueprint registered, and the blueprint URL should be included in the OpenStack Specification.

Product Working Group Liaisons Role

Introducing A Feature/Improvement

It should be assumed introducing a feature/improvement depending on availability resources and other priorities, it’ll likely require a notice of a release or two with project teams before any work can begin. Therefore planning and discussion should happen as soon as possible. A liaison will be assigned to oversee an idea cross-project with the following responsibilities:

1. Create or have someone create the technical OpenStack specification.
2. CC cross-project spec liaisons of projects to specification for attention. If needed email cross-project spec liaisons for attention.
3. If any specifications needs additional attention, you can add an item to the cross-project meeting agenda, and have it be discussed realtime.
4. Specify in the cross-project spec the topic branch for work to be carried out on. This will allow all development work in gerrit to be found easily with the topic filter across the different projects.
5. Once enough consensus is met by the cross-project spec liaisons of the necessary projects, the specification will be passed to the Technical Committee for approval.

Tracking Feature/Improvement

1. The Product Working Group Liaison should identify with each project involved who will actually implement the feature/improvement.
2. Alignment with each project implementing the feature/improvement in the same release is a nice to have. It should be fine to have some projects start early, but should be considered incomplete until all necessary projects are done implementing.
3. The Product Working Group liaison should continue to communicate with the implementers on each project to track progress. It’s up to the liaison to identify when things are stalling and working with the project team on someone to carry on the work. If the implementer is unresponsive, a meeting with the project team should be called to find a new implementer.