Bernard, Russ,
I changed the subject line, I think the thread has continued long enough
:-) Indeed, I collect a set of measurements. These are based on pulling
information from the tracker and the documents. The reason for setting
this up was to try to better understand what is happening in the IETF
process at various levels: for each document, my own AD work, how the
IESG works, where is the time spent in the IETF process as a whole.
http://www.arkko.com/tools/admeasurements/ (start page and disclaimers)
http://www.arkko.com/tools/admeasurements/stat/base.html (main IESG
measurements)
http://www.arkko.com/tools/lifecycle/draft-ietf-mobike-protocol-timing.html
(exists for each approved draft)
The data is current and is being updated every week or so. But before
everyone looks at the graphs and jumps to conclusions, I wanted to
insert a few disclaimers. First, this is based on tracker data and it
does not go into that far into the past -- and some of the older data
might even not be all that accurate. Second, I recently added a lot of
measurements and I don't yet have 100% confidence that my tool gets
everything correct. This is particularly true of the items looking at
various aspects of Discusses. Third, some of the measurements look at
tracker substates, which are not used by all ADs and no one uses them
completely accurately. And last but not least, I don't want anyone to
blindly look at the numbers without considering what's behind them.
There are significant variations between documents. Tracker status and
real world situation may be different. Areas differ. There is limited
amount of information about documents prior to them becoming WG
documents. And its not necessarily the goal of the IETF to produce a
large number of documents as fast as it can; I have no way to measure
quality in these numbers. These are so hard issues that its not even
clear that the statistics have more value than acting as entertaining
trivia about the process.
That being said, it is beneficial to understand what is happening and
what changes are occurring in the process. Or understand where
improvements might have a negligible vs. visible impact.
One of the things that the IESG has been concerned about recently is
that the number of outstanding Discusses is growing. We talked about
this in our May retreat and identified some actions to help reduce this
problem. For instance, better tool support so that the ADs would better
see the different things that are waiting for their action, getting the
document shepherds better involved in the resolution process, informing
authors how they should respond to Discusses, using RFC Editor notes to
make small changes when the authors are slow in producing a new version,
better checks of documents before they come to telechats (e.g., to
ensure that formal syntax in a document is free of errors), etc. These
would be in addition to the usual things we'd do, like debate whether
the Discuss was within the Discuss criteria, whether the issue is real,
try to ensure that the AD and the authors are being responsive over
e-mail, etc.
Another interesting area to think about is the time that our processes
take. For instance, documents that go through me take on the average
five months from publication request to approval. But there is a lot of
variation. This time includes everything from AD review, IETF Last Call
to IESG review and waiting for document revisions, etc. One interesting
piece of information is that documents that require no revision during
this process are very rare, but they go through the system about five
times as fast. If we look at the (unreliable) substates, they appear to
indicate that the IESG processing time is divided roughly 1:2:1 for
waiting on AD, authors, and mandatory process waits like last call periods.
I am working to extend the analysis a little bit further by including
individual draft and WG document stages. You see some of the results of
this in the third URL above, but I'd like to understand what fraction of
the overall draft-smith-00 to RFC time is taken by the different stages
for all IETF work, and how the stages have developed over time.
Comments and suggestions on what would be useful to measure are welcome.
Jari
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