Re: New root cause problems?

[Steve Crocker <steve at stevecrocker.com>]

In addition to choosing the right way to look at the distribution of 
total action times, I strongly recommend breaking down the transactions 
into component parts and looking at the details.  The exchange I had 
with Sam Hartman was a good example.  On 5/23. Sam wrote:

> I'd think two months would be doing good for IESG processing.  That
> includes AD review, IETf last call, telechat delays and a bit of slop
> for interaction with the authors.  However that's time to travel
> through the queue, not actually time spent on that document.
>
> Because of the delays involved with telechats and last call, getting a
> WG document done in less than a month of wall time or an individual
> document done in less than 1.5 months is very unlikely.

What catches my attention -- and brings shudders as I remember my time 
as an AD -- is that he paints a picture that looks like

T[IESG] = T[AD] + T[last call] + T[telechat delay] + T[authors]

Now each of these terms has quite different characteristics.  The last 
call and telechat delays add up to a few weeks, to the overall time is 
at least a couple of months.  But those terms probably have moderately 
low variance.  On the other hand, the T[AD] and T[authors] terms have 
very low minimums but extremely high variance, and it's within those 
terms that the real issues emerge.

I suspect if you break those terms down even further, interesting and 
useful dynamics will emerge.

I'm certainly not picking on Sam but merely using his responses as a 
good clue for untangling the separate effects.

In a subsequent note, in regard to T[AD], Sam said

> It depends a lot on a document.  I can often do a document in in two
> hours if it is reasonably short and I understand the technology and
> the document quality is good.  I have one document languishing
> somewhat in my queue because I need to block out an entire day for it
> and finding a full day to work on one document is hard.
>
>
> Keep in mind that AD review can easily have round trips with the
> authors.
>
> Also, as you are well aware, finding the time among all the other
> things is difficult.

To me, this suggests it would be useful to try to identify the issues 
that make it easy and quick to process some documents, but harder and 
longer to process other documents.

There may be some issues related to just the quantity of work, but I 
suspect the bigger issues are qualitative and we may learn something if 
we probe more deeply and not just study the distributions of the overall 
processing times.

Steve









Dave Crocker wrote:
> > o be slightly provocative, if the average
> > times are forced upwards by a long tail of WGs/drafts/RFCs that
> > take extremely long times to get done due to one-of-a-kind reasons,
> > it would seem fair to remove thoses cases from consideration.
>
>
>
> use the median, rather than the mean.  
>
>
>   d/
>   ---
>   Dave Crocker
>   Brandenburg InternetWorking
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