[gmx-developers] GitLab "Milestones"

[Eric Irrgang]

Hi Devs.

In the call today, there was a lot of talk about how not to use Milestones. I'm not sure how much agreement there was on how to use them, though. Here are some notes on what I understand the outcome to have been, and where questions remain.

1. One observation was that there are a lot of Milestones related to the upcoming 2022 release. Can someone comment on which Milestone (if any) developers should be pointing their issues, MRs, or reviewer energy at to tackle the remaining 2022-critical stuff?

2. The previous strategy of automatically punting issues from one "infrastructure-stable" milestone to the next has been abandoned. I believe there is now a request that contributors should not select a Milestone that implies a point in the development cycle. Is the expectation now that due dates or release targets will be decided at the biweekly meetings or at the quarterly planning meetings?

3. There exist several feature based Milestones (used in several cases in order to have the burn-down chart and project board for big collaborative subprojects). Presumably these are clearly distinct from the Milestones that equate to points in the development calendar, and can optionally use due dates for additional clarification.

4. At the last quarterly meeting, a "winter planning" Milestone was created to hold "umbrella issues" and such that still require group discussion regarding disposition of available effort or scheduling in the project roadmap. Do we still want to collect issues this way, or are we using a shared Google Doc to the exclusion of this milestone?

5. Is there any additional guidance on how we can track which issues have been allocated effort and which are awaiting discussion? There exist a series of "Status::" labels, but it is not clear who sets these or under what circumstances.

6. If anyone is looking for a place to record the results of these discussions or to refer to the records of previous discussions, try https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/blob/master/docs/dev-manual/reportstyle.rst and https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/blob/master/docs/dev-manual/change-management.rst

Best,
Eric