Storyboard Needs and Alternatives

[melanie witt]

On 10/25/22 10:19, Clark Boylan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> There have apparently been disparate discussions among different projects on whether or not they want to continue using Storyboard and what alternatives they should consider. Having these discussion is healthy, but I think we should try to have them in the open with a broad audience to ensure we've considered all the various moving parts involved. I'll do my best to kick start that discussion here in this thread.
> 
> The Problem(s)
>   * Storyboard is slow.
>   * Storyboard's deployment is aging and needs to be updated.
>   * Storyboard is largely unmaintained at this point.
>   * Web crawlers/indexers struggle to index Storyboard content because it is rendered client side via API calls.
> 
> These first two problems are related. There are apparently fixes for known performance issues and other long-standing bugs that have yet to be deployed as we need to update the deployment platform to a newer version of python.
> 
> Options
>   * Update the Storyboard deployment and see if that improves things enough to make people happy.
>   * Migrate projects onto one or more different issue trackers.
> 
> The first option would almost certainly need someone to step up and help out. But before we do that it is probably worthwhile to solicit feedback indicating people would want to continue to use storyboard if its performance and other usability issues are addressed.
> 
> The second option opens us to a tremendous number of different possibilities. Launchpad, Gitea, GitHub, Bugzilla, Trac, Redmine, etc. I think for this discussion to be productive we should avoid digging too deeply into these options now. And instead determine if Storyboard is something that we as a community want to try and keep alive. Once we've answered that question we can shift gears to this option if necessary.
> 
> We would love to hear your feedback. Additional user issues with storyboard, interest in updating/maintaining Storyboard (or the opposite), and thoughts on whether or not addressing known problems with the service would be sufficient to make people want to keep using it are all helpful.

As Sean mentioned, as a team (nova) we are going to discontinue use of 
storyboard for the placement project and start using launchpad again to 
make things consistent between nova and placement.

Launchpad also works well for tracking bug fix backports because you can 
"target to series" a single bug to add older releases to it. Backport 
patches get automatically posted on launchpad by the infra tooling 
without the need to create a new Task for each backport and adjusting 
the commit message of the backport to reference that Task.

That aside, I can share a little feedback about storyboard based on my 
experience using it for placement and openstackclient.

It might boil down to the first problem you listed "storyboard is slow" 
but I have found the search function to be unusable. A frequent workflow 
for me is to search for existing bugs in a project based on a keyword in 
the title, summary, or comments. With storyboard I haven't been able to 
succeed in doing that. From what I understand, you are supposed to be 
able to scope the search by project:<name> but the search will not 
accept it unless you choose it from the dropdown box that is supposed to 
appear. The dropdown populates extremely slowly or sometimes not at all. 
I realize I can just go to a project and choose to show 1000 items per 
page and use the browser search on the titles instead, but that won't 
help for keywords in the summary or comments.

Storyboard also isn't _as_ easy for the aforementioned patch backporting 
that happens constantly in nova. We could add a Task per older release 
to a Story and adjust the backport patch commit messages to reference 
the matching Tasks (this is essentially what I have to do downstream and 
it can be tedious 😇). Not a huge deal but in comparison not as easy as 
launchpad.

Other than that, I don't have any issues with storyboard. It's just 
because I use search functions so often in bug trackers in general, it 
happens to be not so usable for me overall.

> The goal here isn't to try and convince anyone they should use Storyboard. Instead we're trying to understand if there are those that would like to keep using Storyboard, and if so, what effort would be necessary to make that possible. Once we've sorted this out we can have a followup discussion on what would be necessary to support projects that don't want to use Storyboard any longer.
> 
> Clark
>