Storyboard Needs and Alternatives

Wed Oct 26 11:22:04 UTC 2022

My few cents

In addition to all mentioned already I would like to add that I personally don’t feel UX intuitive. Even trying to work with it multiple times I am never really sure where do I need to click.
Example from today - I want to add dependency in one story to another (in the same project) and I can’t find it. Maybe I want to close story as duplicate - I don’t know how.

Relatively often I try to have a look and process some issues (i.e. respond to the reporter) from mobile device. With storyboard this is not possible for me, it feels like a disaster.
Having tasks inside single story can be mapped to task and subtask from some other issue tracker. It is all cool, but trying to have multiple tasks under story (https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2008619) also didn’t end up in being a success. It is good that task is automated to move to i.e. merged, but how to figure out later by which change? You can see on example of this story that event history is so long that you can’t do anything useful with it anymore.

I don’t want to continue listing issues. To answer the initial question - even assuming current issues of StoryBoard can be fixed I have issues using it (I tried multiple times and every time I am just frustrated). I don’t find this tool fulfilling task of being effective issue tracker. The fact that the software itself is barely maintained it is even more a sign for me this is not going to end good. I think most of us are having already enough of work to do not to waste time on something where better solutions (including open source) exist. 

After trying to adapt existing tools to my processes and seeing how fast this becomes unusable I personally started with just relying only on most basic functionality (GitHub/Gitea/GitLab issues) without bells and whistles and am just fine - KISS

From all user-facing projects I am taking care of I place my “-1” to Storyboard. It should not only fit our dev processes, but be easy and intuitive to all users trying to report bugs.

Artem

> On 26. Oct 2022, at 11:56, Sean Mooney <smooney at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 2022-10-25 at 14:29 -0700, melanie witt wrote:
>> 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.
> as a concreate example  and to refersh my memory of using story board i tried to navagate to the placment project yesterday.
> to do that i searched for it in the projects tab as openstack/placement
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/list?q=openstack%2Fplacement
> 
> as you can porbaly see its not in the list of results
> 
> if i just seach for placement
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/list?q=placement
> its the last result with the title openstack/placement ...
> 
> if we click on that https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/openstack/placement
> and say take the 3rd bug "Bug in placement conf file for Apache HTTPD"
> and seach for placement and HTTPD
> 
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/search?q=placement%20HTTPD&title=placement%20HTTPD
> 
> its not in the lsit of results
> 
> if i use the full title 
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/search?q=Bug%20in%20placement%20conf%20file%20for%20Apache%20HTTPD&title=Bug%20in%20placement%20conf%20file%20for%20Apache%20HTTPD
> also not there
> 
> however the popup that you get if you wait actully finds the story.
> 
> this UX makes story board feel like perl. you write it once and never read it again because you cant trivially find things using either the seach
> fucntionality or paging though the bugs.
> ile go to https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/openstack/placement and set the limit to 100 or 1000 and using your broser to search.
> 
> i know it has some nice feature liek being ablt to create boards and worklist ectra to tag and track things bug the out of box or new user expeince is
> pretty bad if you dont actully go build better views in it as a tool.
> 
> for example and not picking on anyoen in particalar this board created by the monasca team 
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/board/190
> looks pretty nice. its kanban inspired, clear to see and a arguablly niceer way visualise things the an etherpad for cordinating reviews
> but that isnt a day to day pain point for us in the same way fileing tasks for backports and updatign the commit message woudl be or searching for
> exising bugs.
> 
> there defintly are some nice design element to what storyboard was trying to enable but in its current hosted incarnation it makes our life harder not
> simpler.
> 
> if we as a comunity were to move to somethign other then storyboard and there was an objection to using launchpad then the 3
> i would evauluate are  github issues, gitea issues if we want to self host it or  gihttps://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2009315t-bug
> (https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug)
> the main blocker for gitia beside our current installtion not being designed to do it is the lack of Confidential bugs for security issues
> https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/3217 i assume sotryborad can do that but gitia and likely git-bug cant. we dont have to deal
> with a lot of secuity bug but its imporant that when we do we can use the same tool as regular bugs to track it so that its simple
> for people to correctly file secuiryt bugs.
> 
> the other issue si have with story boad that if address would make me more accpting with usign it is how you view/manage stories at the project level
> in your dashboard https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/dashboard/stories you have this nice filter stories dropdown with check boxes
> however you cant filter on the subtask states of todo progres review invalid and merged. or on lables/tags.
> since everythign starts with a story that means both bugs and features are stories and since you cant filter on lables you cant filter in that view.
> 
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/project/openstack/placement that is also true of the project view althought there its worse since
> the stories are displayed in tab base on active, meged and invalid state. those tabsl reload when you click on them so you also cant swithc beteen
> them simply. without the abilty to filter stories on tag/labes i cant get a bug or feature view without createing a borad myself.
> its extra fustrating since the tags are displayed on the page so i can clearlly see what ones are bugs or rfes but cant filter.
> i also cant find all stories that are "untriaged" since i cant display only the stories without tags.
> 
> i can almost get there with https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/list?status=active&project_id=1113&tags=bug 
> that allows be to quickly filter to a proeject and look for a spcific tag, in this case placement and bug but i cant
> do "!= bug | != rfe" or find all stories without the "triaged" tag ectra so wee what are the new issues that as a bug triager i
> 
> while writing this reply i spend a littel tiem trying to create a boad to adress these issues and you can mostly hide some of them
> https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/board/254
> its simple to get all the untiraged issues, rfes adn bugs and group them.
> where you start hitting rough edges is when you want to dig deeper.
> storyboard allow syou to filter on storay status (merged invalid active) but that does not actully work properly.
> going back to the httpd bugs https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2009315 it has one task in todo and has the bug tag
> its in the all bug list bug does not show up in the bug backlog.
> the fixed bugs has 5 listed which is nice. what is not nice is if i look for stories in status merged for placment with the bug key its empty.
> i has to also seach for bugs with the fixed tag which has to be manulaly added.
> 
> so while at first glance it looks liek its easy to adress the isseus i raised jsut creating boards to provide the view you need when you try you hit
> roadblocks pretty quickly. the view also does not show tags or allow you to filter within the view 
> 
> storyboad had a lot of potential and some nice features planned but the current install feels like a beta and not something that is ready for
> production use. it was mentioned this is an old verions. if the isntnace coudl be updated and some/all of these issues have been adress already then
> im not against trying it for another release but if noti really think its time to move on. its not form a lack of trying to use story borad that i
> dislike it. its form using it to try and find things. 
> 
> i know this may come across overly negitive but i wanted to give feedback on the frustratiosn
> we have had so that if there are people that can work on adressing it we could continue to use it.
> in my day job i currently have to use downstream:(jira, bugzilla, trello) and upstream:(github issues, storyboard, launchpad)
> of those tools whiel storyboad is arguable better the bugzilla in every way excpte searching/grouping issues that alone makes
> it the hardest tool for me to use out of all of them. none of them are perferct and i can see why the story board team built
> it but it does not align well to projects that need to maintain and backport our code across multiple releases.
> 
> 
>>> 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

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