Re: Front-end delays

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Henning,

Thank you for a series of reasonable suggestions.

My thoughts are inline.

Spencer


There has been a fair amount of effort in accelerating the tail end of the document process, i.e., after IETF last call. It is unclear whether this has succeeded (as there don't seem to be any published measurements), but I believe that the main problem with timeliness is now in the WG process itself. Each case is unique, but there are a disturbing number of modest-size documents that have taken 3 to 5 years from first individual draft to RFC. In a separate message, I'll have more process- and people-oriented suggestions, but here are some simple things that would at least allow us to measure, and thus manage, delays:

Whether "the main problem with timeliness is now in the WG process itself" is true or not, it is worth removing systemic sources of delay in the WG process.

(1) Problem: Currently, the mapping between charter items and drafts is often vague and those not intimately involved with the process are often left to guess which draft(s) meant to address which charter item.

Proposal: Once the I-Ds have been created, the charter is updated to reflect I-D names. This doesn't have to be done for every single draft, but doing such an update once for each IETF meeting seems easy, as there are no substantive changes.

I like this suggestion. The gotcha is that "I-D creation" is not a one-step process, as many WGs start out with individual drafts that get renamed, and even combined, as they are adopted as WG drafts.

If your suggestion is "once the I-Ds have been adopted as WG I-Ds for a charter milestone ...", I think this would work well - and would also point out the milestones with approaching dates where the WG has not even agreed on baseline text.

There is one missing aspect to this - WG charters aren't consistent between "the WG thinks we're through" (we requested publication) and "the IETF thinks we're through" (the document has been approved for publication). We give WGs and ADs a lot of flexibility in specifying milestones - do we need this flexibility? If charters said, "we have three dates for each document - WG draft adopted, publication requested, approved for publication", and tracked these dates, we would know a lot more about where the delays in the process are than we know today.

(2) The I-D tracker should keep track of the charter deadline for each document so that the author and WG chairs can trivially see whether a document is on track or not. [This item can obviously be used to automatically generate (1).]

As you say, this is an obviously good thing to do, given (1).

(3) At each WG meeting, it should be expected that after the agenda bashing, the delivery schedule for each draft is reviewed, maybe with a red (already out of schedule), yellow (likely to miss schedule) and green (possible/likely to meet schedule) indication.

Two points here -

The IETF face-to-face meeting is supposed to be our high-bandwidth exchange opportunity, so reviewing this schedule, with color coding, can also help us focus on what documents need our attention. This could also be a time for editors to say, "I need help", or even, "you need another editor".

A number of WGs are in constant tension between the current charter deliverables and adopting new work items. If a WG can say, "look, we're all green, except for two yellow documents that we have a plan to recover", that's got to help an AD agree to a new charter item.

(4) Just like the RFC editor and IANA provides statistics, each area should provide an overview of its status at the IESG plenary, indicating the major work items of each WG and whether the WG is generally on schedule or behind. Again, one could imagine a color coding, e.g., if 30% or more of the charter items are "in the red", the WG is flagged red.

Back in the days of 40 or so APPS area working groups, the APPS ADs presented their report card for the APPS working groups at an APPS Open Area meeting, usually on Monday morning. I believe their classification was something like "on time", "late, but making progress", or "lost in the weeds". We probably don't need a quantitative scale for this - simply assigning colors would give the WGs a heads-up about what their ADs think, and how much "attention" the WG is likely to get in the next meeting cycle.

Clearly, WG chairs and ADs could "game" the system to make the WG look on time, by continuously adjusting schedules or by having deadlines a decade out. That itself, however, would provide an indication that a WG is not meeting deadlines or is planning to be really slow. If one wanted to, one could indicate both original and current deadline for work items.

I can't believe we don't track original planned dates plus current forecast dates now. We also lose all track of when milestones were completed, because the dates are replaced by DONE. I would like to see this happen.

None of these items make things faster, but they would allow the IETF management to apply project management tools, such as reducing scope, replacing authors, or working group chairs, with some efficiency. More on hypotheses for why things are late in another note.

Henning



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