Measuring IETF and IESG trends (Was: Re: Appeal against IESG blocking DISCUSS on draft-klensin-rfc2821bis)

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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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